Japanese investment and telco giant SoftBank is in talks to acquire DigitalBridge, Bloomberg reports.

DigitalBridge had around $108 billion of assets under management at the end of September, including AIMS, AtlasEdge, DataBank, Switch, Takanock, Vantage Data Centers, and Yondr Group.

As of August, the company had 5.4GW of data center capacity in development or operation.

The company was itself valued at $1.8bn earlier today, down 13 percent this year. With the news of the acquisition discussion, shares jumped 31 percent to $2.33bn.

A transaction could happen as soon as the coming weeks, but is not guaranteed.

SoftBank, led by eccentric billionaire Masayoshi Son, has sought to aggressively invest in the generative AI boom, but the debt-laden company has struggled to fund its ambitions.

The company is one of the primary backers of OpenAI's Stargate data center project (and of OpenAI itself) but has yet to provide all the money it pledged.

This November, the company sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83bn to help fund its OpenAI plans - a move that Son said made him cry.

DigitalBridge portfolio company Vantage is behind one of the Stargate projects, a near-gigawatt data center in Wisconsin.

Alternative investment management firm 26North was in talks to acquire DigitalBridge back in May.

DigitalBridge, this November, closed an $11.7bn DBP III fund to invest in data centers, fiber, and tower infrastructure.