A few weeks ago, SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son stood alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to unveil the Stargate Project, an artificial intelligence venture with OpenAI that could cost $500 billion (¥75.9 trillion) or more. Now, Son is figuring out how to pay for it.
The Japanese billionaire is looking at a technique called project financing that is sometimes linked with oil and gas projects, according to people familiar with the matter. The strategy is used to build capital-intensive, large-scale infrastructure projects like the Trans-Alaskan pipeline — and has the big advantages that it typically requires less money upfront from anchor investors and can resort to long-term financing based on the project’s expected cash flows.
SoftBank is exploring ways to incorporate some aspects of that funding structure in Stargate, which would span multiple datacenter and power-generation projects, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing private information. One scenario under discussion would have SoftBank, OpenAI and partners Oracle and Abu Dhabi’s MGX contribute in equity about 10% of the overall cost and tap debt markets for much of the rest, said two of the people.
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