AI Slowdown Hits SoftBank Stock Price, Plummeting 12%
On September 14, Monday, Asian stock markets opened with SoftBank Group's stock price plummeting 12% in a single day, while the Nikkei 225 index fell 1.7%, dropping below 63,000 points, marking a six-week low. The immediate trigger for this round of sell-off was Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for AI companies to slow down the pace of releasing advanced models to address safety risks.
Several Japanese tech stocks also suffered significant losses on the same day—Kioxia Holdings fell 8.6%, Taiyo Yuden dropped 8.3%, Advantest declined 4.5%, and Tokyo Electron decreased by 2.6%, with declines concentrated in companies highly related to AI chips and memory supply chains.
The sell-off also affected the South Korean market—SK Hynix fell 5.4% to 1.714 million won, Samsung Electronics dropped 3.4% to 250,750 won, and the KOSPI index fell 3.2% to 6,687.46 points. The combined market value of SK Hynix and Samsung evaporated by approximately $91 billion (about 123 trillion won).
The core event triggering this panic was Amodei's article published over the weekend titled "We Must Slow Down the Cutting Edge," in which he argued that AI companies should "slow down the pace of enhancing model capabilities" and suggested the industry consider limiting the "raw materials" needed to train cutting-edge models, such as the investment in training computing power itself. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately expressed agreement on X and signaled a delay in the company's IPO plans, while Elon Musk also publicly supported the idea.
Additional factors included the closure of Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline, which caused international oil prices to rise above $102 per barrel, leading the market to increase expectations for simultaneous tightening of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan this week. Analysts from Kiwoom Securities attributed this round of volatility to a combination of "the aftershocks of August CPI, the debate over slowing AI investment, and the September FOMC meeting," and suggested that investors could take advantage of this volatility to buy on dips.
In market mechanics, SoftBank's leading decline in this round of sell-off is directly related to its deep capital binding with OpenAI—SoftBank has previously invested a total of $65 billion in OpenAI, holding about 13% of the shares, making it the second-largest external shareholder after Microsoft (27%). SoftBank also co-led OpenAI's $122 billion financing round in March this year. The market generally interprets the "AI slowdown" statement as a direct negative for the future cash flow and valuation of companies like OpenAI that are not yet profitable and highly dependent on continuous financing and computing power expansion. SoftBank's stock price has historically been highly sensitive to OpenAI-related news, with fluctuations often amplified by the market. Notably, SoftBank is due to repay a $2.59 billion bridge loan to OpenAI on September 15 (the next day), and this upcoming debt obligation further amplifies market concerns about SoftBank's balance sheet pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
SoftBank and its leader Masayoshi Son have historically experienced dramatic stock price fluctuations due to bets on single star assets—from the Vision Fund's massive losses on WeWork investments to the current full bet on OpenAI and ARM. Son's consistent strategy has been "concentrated bets, long-term holding." He has previously publicly referred to the "AI bubble theory" as "an insult to AI" and postponed his planned retirement in his 60s to personally lead SoftBank's continued investments in "artificial superintelligence." This consistent style makes SoftBank's stock price much more sensitive to negative news related to AI than its peers.
In terms of funding pathways, SoftBank's binding to OpenAI has evolved from a simple equity investment to a multi-layered capital relationship—besides the $65 billion cumulative investment and 13% stake, SoftBank also co-led OpenAI's $122 billion financing round in March this year. Previously, it attempted to seek a $6 billion margin loan using OpenAI equity as collateral (which was unsuccessful) and is now facing a $2.59 billion bridge loan due on September 15. Meanwhile, Son is advancing an independent IPO plan for his "Roze" AI and robotics business, targeting a scale of $100 billion, which means SoftBank is currently in a phase of "multi-line financing and multi-line debt repayment" with high-leverage capital operations.
This strategy of "using large-scale debt and cross-level equity nesting to gain exposure to core AI assets" is consistent with SoftBank's capital path during the Vision Fund era, which has historically dragged down the entire group's market value due to setbacks faced by single invested companies. The current position of the AI industry is in a phase of intense debate over capability expansion and safety regulation, and SoftBank, as one of the few institutional investors deeply leveraged on a single cutting-edge AI lab (OpenAI), has its stock price fluctuations essentially serving as a market proxy for measuring "how much the discussion of AI slowdown impacts the financing prospects of leading labs."
Essentially, this is a capital repricing triggered by changes in regulatory and safety narratives—Amodei's call for slowing down does not have legal force, but the market mechanism is: as long as the CEO of a leading lab publicly acknowledges the "need to slow down," investors will immediately lower their expectations for that lab's future revenue growth curve and computing power expansion speed. Companies like OpenAI, which have not yet turned cash flow positive and are highly dependent on continuous financing to maintain operations, are extremely sensitive to changes in valuation based on growth expectations. As one of OpenAI's largest external capital exposures, SoftBank's stock price effectively acts as the first amplifier for the "AI slowdown narrative" transmitting to the real capital market, which is why the same news caused a drop of 12% for SoftBank, far greater than the 2%-5% declines seen in downstream chip equipment stocks (Advantest, Tokyo Electron).
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- The deeper the bet, the faster the fall.
- As soon as the slowdown is announced, the highest leveraged accounts shake first.
- A statement on safety re-prices capital faster than any regulatory document.