NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world, and recently became the first company in history to touch a market cap of $5 trillion, but one of the biggest VCs in the world appears to have seen this as a sign to exit from its position.
Softbank has sold its entire stake in NVIDIA worth $5.83 billion. The firm said in its earnings statement that it sold 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October. The money that Softbank has collected from the sale will go towards funding its $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI. NVIDIA shares were down 3.25% in trade today.
“We want to provide a lot of investment opportunities for investors, while we can still maintain financial strength,” said SoftBank’s chief financial officer, Yoshimitsu Goto, during an investor presentation. “So through those options and tools we make sure that we are ready for funding in a very safe manner,” he said, adding that the stake sales were part of the firm’s strategy for “asset monetization.”
The offloading of the Nvidia stake had nothing to do with concerns about artificial intelligence valuations, a source told CNBC.
Softbank has a long association with NVIDIA. SoftBank’s investment history in Nvidia began in 2017 when its Vision Fund became an early investor, building a stake worth about $4 billion. However, SoftBank fully divested this holding in January 2019 amid a prolonged plunge in Nvidia’s share price, which forced a protective collar strategy that limited their potential gains. This divestment was before Nvidia surged into a $4 trillion market value with the AI boom, which SoftBank’s founder Masayoshi Son later regretted, calling Nvidia “the fish that got away” as the value of those shares skyrocketed to over $150 billion by mid-2024 as NVIDIA became the most valuable company in the world. SoftBank re-entered the Nvidia stake in 2025, gradually increasing its holding to around $3 billion by the end of March 2025, but has fully exited its stake for $5.83 billion in November 2025.
The timing of NVIDIA’s stake sale, however, is interesting. There’s rising chatter about an AI bubble, with many pointing out the tangled webs of investments between NVIDIA, model companies like OpenAI, and datacenter providers like Oracle. There are also questions on whether AI companies like OpenAI are making enough money to justify their investment spends in datacenters. Meanwhile, some experts, like Yann LeCun, believe that AI progress might eventually plateau along the current LLM path that the industry is on, and new breakthroughs might be required to continue improving AI models. But if AI progress can continue, and AI usage can keep accelerating, there’s no telling how much more AI valuations can increase. Softbank has been burnt once by selling its NVIDIA stake too soon — it’ll hope it hasn’t set itself up for an encore.