SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son delivers remarks next to U.S. President Donald Trump at an ‘Investing in America’ event in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Softbank‘s Vision Fund business on Tuesday posted a loss in the fiscal year ended March as it booked slowing gains at its massive tech investment arm.
SoftBank said it notched a gain on investment at its Vision Funds of 434.9 billion yen in the fiscal year, a 40% fall from the 724.3 billion yen booked in the previous year.
In its fiscal fourth quarter — the three months ended March — SoftBank’s Vision Funds segment recorded a 26.1 billion yen gain, helped by a rise in the value of TikTok owner ByteDance.
The Vision Fund segment overall logged a pretax loss of 115.02 billion yen ($777.7 mllion) versus a profit of 128.2 billion yen in the previous fiscal year.
For the latest fiscal year, SoftBank saw gains on its investments in Chinese ridehailing company Didi as well as South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang. However, the performance of its investment arm was hurt by a drop in value of companies including AutoStore.
The Vision Funds are a key focus for investors who are looking for signs of improvement at SoftBank’s huge investment arm, after it swung to a surprise loss in the company’s fiscal third quarter.
SoftBank’s investment division can be inconsistent, as it is driven by changes in public and private financial markets.
SoftBank’s stock is down about 17% this year as volatility in financial markets and concerns about the macroeconomic environment continues to weigh on the company.
SoftBank hits back at Stargate funding report
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has sought to position company as a key player in artificial intelligence through various investments and acquisitions. The firm owns the majority of semiconductor designer Arm and announced plans this year to acquire server chip designer Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. Ampere’s semiconductors are designed to run AI applications.
One of SoftBank’s biggest AI bets has been on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader $40 billion financing round in March that valued the startup at $300 billion.
Softbank is also involved in Stargate, a joint venture that was unveiled by U.S. President Donald Trump in January, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into AI infrastructure.
There are still questions about how SoftBank plans to finance these ventures and whether it will need to sell down some of its holdings in companies like Arm.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg had on Monday reported that dozens of financial players are reassessing investment in data centers due to growing economic volatility, and SoftBank has yet to come up with a financing template for Stargate.
Yoshimitsu Goto, chief finance officer at SoftBank, said during a Tuesday press conference that media reports of banks hesitating to fund SoftBank’s efforts are not true.
“We are very much making progress,” Goto said.
He added there are around 100 proposals being made for sites to build data centers as part of Stargate, with the first facilities likely to be in Texas.
SoftBank swings to profit
SoftBank posted its first annual profit in four years at 1.15 trillion yen.
While the Vision Fund was an overall drag on profit, it was a big gain in SoftBank’s older investments in Alibaba, T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom, that helped drive its overall profit.
Arm and SoftBank’s telecommunications business also contributed positively to the group’s overall profitability.
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.
In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.
Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.
In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.
Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.
The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.
“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”
Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.
Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.
The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.
An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.
David Ryder | Getty Images
Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.
The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.
“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”
At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.
The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.
Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.
Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.
Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.
Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.
The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.
While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.
On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.
Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.
Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.
CNBC
Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.
Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.
The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.
Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.
In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”