DigitalBridge to be SoftBank's 'third-party infrastructure arm'

DigitalBridge chief executive Marc Ganzi told the Financial Times that his firm will serve as SoftBank's "third-party infrastructure arm", raising money from institutional investors for data centres, power and other projects linked to the Japanese group's AI expansion. SoftBank's roughly $4bn takeover of DigitalBridge closed on September 30, with the company continuing to operate as a separately managed platform led by Ganzi.

The structure gives Masayoshi Son a vehicle to pull outside LP capital into the most capital-hungry layer of his AI build without putting it on SoftBank's own balance sheet. Son is positioning to control three layers of the AI stack: large language models through SoftBank's stake in OpenAI, chips through Arm, and power and data centres through DigitalBridge.

Ganzi is also sounding cautious on the sector he now anchors. He described the market as a "toppy-esque moment" that felt "very similar to the late 1990s", and compared aggressive debt structures at newer rivals, operating at 70-80% loan-to-value ratios against DigitalBridge's 45%, to "altitude sickness". The coming cycle, he said, would be "marked by a lot of amateurs and a lot of tourists in the next 24 to 36 months", and the capital behind Nvidia's chip-financing initiative is "priced to perfection".

The deal lands in the middle of a dense run of AI-infrastructure moves our tracker has been following, with 448 stories in the last 90 days spanning hyperscaler permitting fights and multi-billion-yen HDD expansions. DigitalBridge's reported assets under management stood at roughly $108bn at the end of September, with stakes in Vantage Data Centers, DataBank, Switch, AtlasEdge and Yondr Group.