If you’re one of those executives at Alphabet, Meta Platforms or Amazon who deals with investors, here’s an idea: Put a large photo of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son on the wall of your office. Next time a visiting investor complains about your AI spending, point to the photo. That should end the discussion.

As much as big tech firms are spending on AI, at least they’re financing much, if not most, of it through internally generated cash. SoftBank in contrast has so far spent $54.6 billion on OpenAI shares by raising money through a combination of various kinds of loans and asset sales. And it’s now gone even further: On Thursday, SoftBank revealed that this week it had borrowed $10 billion using its OpenAI stake as collateral. As SoftBank has committed to put a further $10 billion into OpenAI in October, there’s a good chance it will make that payment using money borrowed against other OpenAI shares. 

Amazon has completed its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, putting in the remaining $35 billion in two stages in recent months, the commerce-and-cloud firm revealed in a securities filing on Friday.

Amazon agreed in late February to invest $50 billion into the ChatGPT creator, but it only put in ...

There’s no doubt about it: AI gave the big cloud firms a lift in business in the June quarter. We’ve already heard that from Google and Microsoft, and on Thursday, Amazon, the biggest cloud firm, followed suit by posting 37% growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit for the quarter. That’s 9 percentage points faster than it reported for the March quarter, and more than double the growth rate for the same period last year. 

Just as strikingly, AWS’ operating profit margin also rose, to 39.4%, the highest since the start of last year. To lift its operating margin while grappling with rising depreciation expenses on new chips and servers is an accomplishment. Amazon stock jumped 9% in response, suggesting investors were more focused on AWS’ accelerating growth than on the huge capital investments it is making to drive future growth. As a reminder of the size of those investments, Amazon burned $7.6 billion in cash in the quarter and raised its 2026 capital expenditures projection by $20 billion to $220 billion.