SoftBank Group’s market value has fallen roughly 50% from its June peak, as rising borrowing costs intensify investor concerns over whether the company’s massive artificial intelligence bets are financially sustainable.
Shares of the Tokyo-based company dropped as much as 6.7% on Thursday alone, extending a decline that has now wiped half the company’s market capitalization off since its all-time high on June 2.
The slide has reshuffled Japan’s corporate rankings: after briefly overtaking Toyota as the country’s most valuable company, SoftBank’s market capitalization, now roughly ¥24.7 trillion, or about $157 billion, has fallen behind both Hitachi and Recruit.
Investor anxiety over AI spending has intensified more broadly after bonds issued by US cloud computing provider CoreWeave fell to levels associated with financial distress, exposing financing risks across the wider AI infrastructure sector that SoftBank has bet heavily on.
Kazuyuki Muramatsu, head of investment management at Nagomi Capital, said SoftBank's vulnerability stands out as investors increasingly scrutinize the financial health of AI-related companies given the group's highly leveraged structure and rising borrowing costs.
The scale of the decline underscores how quickly sentiment toward AI infrastructure spending has shifted, with companies that leaned most aggressively into debt-funded AI bets, like SoftBank, now facing the sharpest market reassessment as financing concerns spread across the sector.
