London, 9 October 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Katie Winearls
SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son is looking to raise up to $100bn from Gulf investors for a new wave of AI investment, according to the Financial Times. He has held talks with senior figures, including in the UAE. The plan this time is new. The fund would not just back start-ups. It would buy established companies and use AI to overhaul how they run. SoftBank has not commented.
The amount is familiar. In 2017, Son raised close to $100bn for the first Vision Fund, mostly from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala. That fund backed Uber and Arm, and it also made one of the most expensive mistakes in modern venture capital: WeWork. Nine years later, Son is going back to the same investors, and the question is whether they will trust him a second time.
Why He Needs the Money
SoftBank has bet heavily on OpenAI. It said last week that it had completed a $30bn investment as part of OpenAI’s latest funding round, and Startup Fortune estimates its total commitment at about $64.6bn. To pay for it, SoftBank sold $11.1bn of high-yield bonds last month, the largest junk bond sale anywhere this year. It has also increased a margin loan secured on its shares in Arm, the Cambridge chip designer, to about $25bn, and it has a $40bn bridge loan due in March 2027.
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SubscribeIts shareholders are worried. SoftBank’s share price has fallen by close to half since early June, and the cost of insuring its debt against default has risen sharply. An attempt to borrow against its OpenAI stake reportedly failed because lenders were unwilling to accept shares in a private company that doesn’t publish full accounts. The Gulf is one of the few places where that much money is still readily available.
What the Gulf Gets
For Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, the logic is clear. Both want to become AI powers rather than just oil exporters. Gulf sovereign wealth funds already own large parts of Europe, from airports to football clubs. A $100bn fund run with SoftBank would give them access to the companies that are changing how the world works, plus influence over where data centres and chips go.
They will also be cautious this time. The first Vision Fund lost billions on WeWork and other failures. Gulf investors will want more control, better terms and a clearer route to getting their money back.
Why Europe Should Pay Attention
The new fund’s plan is to buy existing companies and rebuild them using AI. That makes it, in effect, a private equity fund with an AI strategy. Europe has a lot of the kind of company it would target: profitable mid-sized firms in manufacturing, logistics, financial services and business services, often family-owned and cheaper than their US equivalents. With the euro near a 17-month low, European businesses look cheaper still to buyers with dollars.
That brings opportunity and risk. AI could make these firms more productive. It could also mean a wave of Gulf-funded, Japanese-managed takeovers of exactly the companies that EU leaders want to keep under European control. European regulators and governments that talk about sovereign AI should watch closely who ends up owning the companies that use it.
There is also Arm. Britain’s most valuable tech company is now partly collateral for SoftBank’s borrowing. If SoftBank runs into financial trouble, the future ownership of Arm becomes a question for Britain.
A Crowded Field
Son also isn’t the only one looking for money. SpaceX, Oracle and Broadcom are all raising funds for AI chips, and Anthropic could list next month in what may be the biggest IPO ever. Investors are being asked to fund the AI build-out on a huge scale, at a time when rising bond yields mean they can earn decent returns with much less risk.
There are also signs of strain. OpenAI’s annualised revenue has reportedly stalled at about $25bn since February, and the chipmaker Cerebras withdrew its IPO filing last week. Even Europe’s fastest-growing start-ups depend on investors continuing to believe in AI.
Son is going back to the Gulf because almost no one else can supply $100bn at the scale he needs. That says something about the state of AI funding. Banks are cautious, bond markets are expensive and his own shareholders are losing patience. The idea of buying ordinary companies and making them better with AI is reasonable, and arguably more grounded than funding loss-making start-ups. But it would be run by an investor with a mixed record, paid for by sovereign funds with political goals, and backed by a balance sheet already stretched across OpenAI and Arm. Europe’s governments should get ready now for Gulf-funded bids for their best mid-sized companies.
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