The completion marks one of the largest AI-infrastructure transactions of the year and deepens SoftBank's control over the full AI stack — from chip design through the buildings that house the chips. DigitalBridge, which manages roughly $108 billion in assets across data centers, cell towers, fiber networks, small-cell systems and edge infrastructure, is also an investor in the Stargate data center development scheme.
An independent arm for AI infrastructure
Under the completed structure, SoftBank will anchor DigitalBridge as a $4 billion independent infrastructure platform, allowing it to tap institutional investors for capital targeted at AI data centers, power generation and related assets. The arrangement gives Son's empire a dedicated balance sheet for the long-duration, capital-intensive projects that frontier AI now requires, without directly swelling SoftBank's own debt load.
DigitalBridge has already begun expanding that platform. The firm recently agreed to acquire ArcLight Capital Partners, a move aimed at strengthening its infrastructure and energy-investment capabilities — a signal of how tightly power supply and data center capacity are now linked in AI planning.
Son's growing bet across the AI stack
The DigitalBridge completion is the latest in a rapid sequence of AI investments from Son. SoftBank first put $500 million into OpenAI in 2024, then added roughly $30 billion more in 2025 and committed another $30 billion in 2026, a final tranche that is due to close imminently — bringing its holding to about 13 percent of OpenAI's equity. As of the end of June, OpenAI's rising private valuations had generated about $45 billion in unrealized gains for SoftBank, though OpenAI's delayed listing plans have kept those gains on paper for now.
Beyond OpenAI, SoftBank has agreed to buy the robotics business of Swiss engineering group ABB for $5.4 billion, struck a $6.5 billion deal for U.S. chip startup Ampere Computing, and made a $2 billion equity investment in Intel — all while maintaining its majority stake in Arm Holdings. In September, the company raised $11.1 billion in the largest high-yield corporate bond sale globally on record to fund its investments in OpenAI and other AI-related companies and infrastructure.
A warning beneath the boom
Even as the deal closes, DigitalBridge chief executive Marc Ganzi has urged a measure of caution. Speaking around the completion, Ganzi pointed to cooling data center valuations, tighter financing conditions and local zoning disputes, and warned that around half of the data center leases signed in 2024 may never get built. Anti-data-center sentiment has become a genuine political flashpoint in the United States, with local communities pushing back against the power demands, water use and secrecy of hyperscale projects.
That tension frames the logic of the deal. The biggest technology companies will spend more than $750 billion on capital expenditures this year, and demand for AI compute shows little sign of slowing. SoftBank's answer is to build a separate, institutionally backed engine — DigitalBridge — that can keep funding that buildout even when valuations cool or capital markets tighten.
