SoftBank earnings exceed expectations, driven by massive Intel investment gain

SoftBank Group reported quarterly earnings that beat analyst expectations, and the hero of the story wasn’t OpenAI or some flashy AI startup. It was Intel, the 56-year-old chipmaker that most people had written off as a dinosaur roughly eighteen months ago. The Japanese conglomerate posted net income of ¥347.3 billion ($2.2 billion) for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, which ended June 30. That’s an 18% decline year-over-year, which normally wouldn’t inspire much celebration. But Wall Street had braced for worse, and SoftBank cleared the bar thanks to a jaw-dropping ¥1.3 trillion ($8.5 billion) investment gain from its Intel position. Intel’s resurrection did the heavy lifting Here’s the number that matters: Intel shares surged 216% during the quarter. A stock that had spent years being the punchline of the semiconductor industry more than tripled in value over three months. For SoftBank, which holds a substantial stake in the chipmaker, that translated into an $8.5 billion gain on paper. In English: one legacy chip bet generated nearly four times the company’s entire quarterly net income. The OpenAI-shaped hole in the report SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI contributed essent...