Peek behind the world’s most ambitious artificial intelligence companies, and often there is SoftBank. So it might seem troubling to see the Japanese investment company sell its $5.8bn stake in Nvidia, the chipmaker on whose wares the whole AI boom rests.
SoftBank’s finance chief noted on Tuesday that the sale is nothing personal. Its investment in the chipmaker has, after all, been enormously profitable. And while for Nvidia the optics are not great, the stake in question was tiny in the context of a company with a $4.8tn market capitalisation.
Besides, thanks to the magical maths of AI, what Nvidia loses on one hand it may gain with the other. Assuming SoftBank recycles its cash into more AI-related investment, that ought to support demand for Nvidia’s chips. At the company’s multiple of 20 times estimated annual revenue, a notional $5.8bn of new sales could add nearly $120bn of additional enterprise value.