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The logo of SoftBank is displayed at a company shop in Tokyo, Japan January 28, 2025. 

Issei Kato | Reuters

SoftBank Group posted a surprise quarterly loss Wednesday as investments under its Vision Funds fell into red. The Japanese company’s revenue also missed analysts’ estimates.

Here are Softbank’s results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who have been more consistently accurate:

  • Revenue: 1.83 trillion yen vs. 1.84 trillion yen
  • Net loss of 369.17 billion yen ($2.4 billion) vs. a profit of 298.53 billion yen

The company’s Vision Fund investments clocked a loss of 352.75 billion yen for the quarter ended Dec. 31. They had posted a gain for the preceding two quarters.

The broader Vision Fund segment — which factors in administrative costs, fluctuations in currency, among other things — reported a loss of 309.93 billion yen during the quarter.

SoftBank reported a 2.1% quarter-on-quarter drop in its Vision Fund 1 public portfolio companies, primarily due to a decline in the share price of e-commerce company Coupang, while the value of its investments in private companies dropped 3.3%. Overall, the fair value of SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 portfolio companies declined by 2.8% from the previous quarter-end.

Vision Fund 2 fair value fell by 3.7% from the prior quarter-end. Decreases in the share prices of public companies such as EV-maker Ola Electric Mobility and warehouse automation firm AutoStore outweighed a jump in the stock of food delivery firm Swiggy following its November 2024 listing.

Faber Report: Softbank set to invest $40B in OpenAI at $260B pre-money valuation, sources say

In recent years, SoftBank has made a number of high-value investments in companies that have struggled or marked down their valuations. 

It is now repositioning itself to take advantage of the artificial intelligence boom, where players such as Nvidia have benefited from meteoric demand for chips and data center GPUs.

SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion primary investment in OpenAI at a $260 billion pre-money valuation, sources recently told CNBC’s David Faber.

The new funding would see SoftBank surpass Microsoft as the artificial intelligence startup’s top backer, with OpenAI last valued at $157 billion by private investors in October.

SoftBank has already committed to spending $3 billion per year on OpenAI’s tech. The two companies also have announced a new joint venture called “SB OpenAI Japan,” which will market OpenAI’s enterprise tech exclusively to major companies in Japan.

SoftBank reported its quarterly earnings after trading closed at the Tokyo stock exchange. It’s shares gained 45% last year.

— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Bitmine (BMNR) 1-month

The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another $37 million worth of stock

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another  million worth of stock

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.

Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.

AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.

That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.

Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.

Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.

WATCH: H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater’s Gene Munster

H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater's Gene Munster

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.

The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.

“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.

Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.

Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.

Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.

If all the AI developers are in China, the China stack is going to win, Nvidia CEO tells CNBC

The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.

“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.

Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

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