The cost of insuring SoftBank Group against a default on its debts jumped to its highest level in four years on Friday, as worries about the profitability of artificial intelligence investment swept through global financial markets.
The Japanese technology investor’s five-year credit default swap spread rose 22 basis points to 466 basis points, according to Markit data cited by Reuters — its widest since October 2022. A credit default swap is a form of insurance against a borrower failing to repay its debts; a spread of 466 basis points implies an annual cost of about $466,000 to insure $10 million of SoftBank debt.
SoftBank has become a bellwether for the prospects of AI investment. It holds a $64.6 billion stake in ChatGPT maker OpenAI and owns about 90 per cent of chip designer Arm, whose designs power much of the world’s computing.
Investors have stepped up their scrutiny of SoftBank’s finances this year as the group has taken on more debt at record yields to fund its OpenAI stake. Prospects for a return on that investment have meanwhile been pushed back, with OpenAI delaying its planned stock market listing until 2027.
The immediate trigger was the Democratic Party’s sweeping victory in this week’s US midterm elections, which has raised fears of a slowdown in AI infrastructure development. Investors worry that tougher regulation and tighter scrutiny of data centre construction could curb the build-out on which much of the AI boom depends.
One-third of planned US data centre capacity is now at risk, according to research from Futurum Group, because the projects sit in states where governors may slow their development. The warning adds to a week of strain across the sector: the Nasdaq fell 5.5 per cent on Thursday, its steepest drop since the tariff-driven sell-off of 2025, and South Korea’s KOSPI plunged 8 per cent on Friday, triggering a circuit breaker that halted trading.
The sell-off has spread beyond equities. Dutch lender ING has put about $500 million of data centre loans up for sale, including debt linked to the Stargate AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, in a sign that lenders are also reassessing their exposure to the sector.
For SoftBank, the widening spread is a measure of how quickly sentiment has turned. Only weeks ago the group was seen as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom; now the market is pricing in a materially higher risk that its heavily leveraged bet takes longer to pay off than investors had assumed.
Sources: Reuters, “SoftBank credit risk jumps to 4-year high as AI fears roil market”, 6 November 2026 (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/softbank-cds-softbank-cds-2026-11-06/).
