SoftBank’s market capitalisation fell to half its all-time peak value on Thursday, amid broader negative market sentiment around AI investments amid higher borrowing costs.

The company’s shares closed 6.9 percent lower on Thursday in Tokyo, giving SoftBank a market value of ¥24.5 trillion ($156.2bn, £116.6bn), a 50 percent drop from the shares’ all-time high on 2 June, only about four months ago. The shares are down about 2 percent from the beginning of the year.

Analysts highlighted SoftBank’s highly leveraged financial structure and growing borrowing costs.

Investor scepticism

The company’s credit-default swaps, the price to insure its debt against default, rose to their highest level in nearly four years on Tuesday.

SoftBank relies on debt to finance a large portion of its investments across the AI market, including a nearly $65bn investment in OpenAI.

CoreWeave, a so-called neocloud that shifted focus from cryptocurrency mining to providing AI infrastructure, saw its shares plummet 10 percent on Thursday as part of the market volatility.

The company’s market value is currently about $30bn, down from a peak value of about $90bn in June of last year, three months after it went public in March 2025.

Shares in Nebius and IREN, two other neoclouds, are both down more than 30 percent this month, while Australia’s NextDC saw its shares drop 40 percent on Wednesday after cutting its earnings forecast.

Australian neocloud Firmus cancelled a planned IPO earlier this month, and South Korean cloud firm Elice saw its shares drop nearly one-third on their first day of trading on Tuesday, in two other examples of investor wariness in the sector.