STORY: Japan's SoftBank announced a fourth consecutive quarterly profit on Thursday (February 12).
It hit $1.62 billion for October to December - way ahead of a $2 billion net loss a year before.
The firm was helped by the rising valuation of its OpenAI investment.
Masayoshi Son's conglomerate has now invested more than $30 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and built a shareholding of around 11%.
Softbank has bet it will emerge as a winner in the battle between competing developers of large language models.
OpenAI reportedly wants another capital injection of $100 billion.
With SoftBank seen as a possible investor, as well as Amazon and Nvidia.
SoftBank said it projects a total gain on its OpenAI investment of $19.8 billion at December-end.
The firm has turned to asset sales, bond issuance and loans backed by its other holdings to finance its bets.
SoftBank has already exited its position in Nvidia, and sold part of its stake in T-Mobile for $12.7 billion last year.
OpenAI was once seen as the dominant player among makers of large language models.
But it faces rising costs to train and run its AI models while it sees growing competition from the likes of Google-owner Alphabet.
