Masayoshi Son is making his biggest bet yet: that his brainchild SoftBank will be the center of a revolution driven by artificial intelligence.

Son says artificial superintelligence (ASI) — AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans — will be here in 10 years. It’s a bold call — but perhaps not surprising. He’s made a career out of big plays; notably, one was a $20 million investment into Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in 2000 that has made billions for SoftBank.

Now, the billionaire is hoping to replicate that success with a series of investments and acquisitions in AI firms that will put SoftBank at the center of a fundamental technological shift.

While Son has been outspoken about his vision over the last year, his thinking precedes much of his recent bullishness, according to two former executives at SoftBank.

“I vividly remember the first time he invited me to his home for dinner and sitting on his porch over a glass of wine, he started talking to me about singularity – the point at which machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence,” Alok Sama, a former finance chief at SoftBank until 2016 and and president until 2019, told CNBC.

In 2016, SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in a deal worth about $32 billion at the time. Today, Arm is valued at more than $145 billion. While Arm blueprints form the basis of the designs for nearly all the world’s smartphones, these days, the company is looking to position itself as a key player in AI infrastructure. Arm-based chips are part of Nvidia’s systems that go into data centers.

In March, SoftBank also announced plans to acquire another chip designer, Ampere Computing, for $6.5 billion.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is another marquee investment for SoftBank, with the Japanese giant saying recently that planned investments in the company will reach about 4.8 trillion Japanese yen ($32.7 billion).

SoftBank has also invested in a number of other companies related to AI across its portfolio.

“SoftBank’s AI strategy is comprehensive, spanning the entire AI stack from foundational semiconductors, software, infrastructure, and robotics to cutting-edge cloud services and end applications across critical verticals such as enterprise, education, health, and autonomous systems,” Neil Shah, co-founder at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“Mr. Son’s vision is to cohesively connect and deeply integrate these components, thereby establishing a powerful AI ecosystem designed to maximize long-term value for our shareholders.” 

There is a common theme behind SoftBank’s investments in AI companies that comes directly from Son — namely, that these firms should be using advanced intelligence to be more competitive, successful, to make their product better and their customers happy, a person familiar with the company told CNBC. They could only comment anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

And then came robots. Major tech figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla boss Elon Musk are now talking about robotics as a key application of AI — but Son was thinking about this more than a decade ago.

In 2012, SoftBank took a majority stake in a French company called Aldebaran. Two years later, the two companies launched a humanoid robot called Pepper, which they billed as “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.”

Later, Son said: “In 30 years, I hope robots will become one of the core businesses in generating profits for the SoftBank group.”

SoftBank’s bet on Pepper ultimately flopped for the company. SoftBank slashed jobs at its robotics unit and stopped producing Pepper in 2020. In 2022, German firm United Robotics Group agreed to acquire Aldebaran from SoftBank.

But Son’s very early interest in robots underscored his curiosity for AI applications of the future.

“He was in very early and he has been thinking about this obsessively for a long time,” Sama, who is author of “The Money Trap,” said.

In the background, Son was cooking up something bigger: a tech fund that would make waves in the investing world. He founded the Vision Fund in 2017 with a massive $100 billion in deployable capital.

SoftBank aggressively invested in companies across the world with some of the biggest bets on ride hailing players like Uber and Chinese firm Didi.

But investments in Chinese technology companies and some bad bets on firms like WeWork soured sentiment for the Vision Fund as it racked up billions of dollars of losses by 2023.

SoftBank still has investments in driverless car companies, such as British startup Wayve.

Timing clearly wasn’t on Son’s side. After record losses at the Vision Fund in 2022, Son declared SoftBank would go into “defense” mode, significantly reducing investments and being more prudent. It was at this time that companies like OpenAI were beginning to gain steam, but still before the launch of ChatGPT that would put the company on the map.

“When those companies came to head in 2021, 2022, Masa would have been in a perfect place but he had used all his ammunition on other companies,” the former Vision Fund exec said.

“When they came to age in 21, 22, the Vision Fund had invested in five or six hundred different companies and he was not in a position to invest in AI and he missed that.”

Son himself said this year that SoftBank wanted to invest in OpenAI as early as 2019, but it was Microsoft that ended up becoming the key investor. Fast forward to 2025, the Vision Fund — of which there are now two — has a portfolio stacked full of AI focused companies.

But that period was tough for investors across the board. The Covid-19 pandemic, booming inflation and rising rates hit public and private markets across the board after years of loose monetary policy and a tech bull run.

SoftBank didn’t see that time as a missed opportunity to invest in AI, a person familiar with the company said.

Instead, the the company is of the view that it is still very early in the AI investing cycle, the source added.

This year, Chinese firm DeepSeek made waves after releasing a so-called reasoning model that appeared to be developed more cheaply than its U.S. rivals. The fact that a Chinese company managed the feat, despite all the export restrictions for advanced tech in place, rocked global financial markets that were betting the U.S. had an unassailable AI lead.

While markets have since recovered, the potential of surprise advances in technology at such an early stage in AI remains a big risk for the likes of SoftBank.

“As with most technology investments the key challenge is to invest in the winning technologies. Many of the investments SoftBank has made are in the current leaders but AI is still in its relative infancy so other challengers could still rear up from nowhere,” Dan Baker, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC.

Still, Son has made it clear he wants to set SoftBank up with DNA that will see it survive and thrive for 300 years, according to the company’s website.

That may go some way to explain the big risks that Son takes, and his conviction when it comes to particular themes and companies — and the valuations he’s willing to pay.

“He (Son) made some mistakes, but directionally he is going in the same driection, which is — he wants to be sure that he is a real player in AI and he is making it happen,” the former Vision Fund exec said.

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the U.S. government a share of revenues from certain chips sold in China, the Financial Times reported, in an unprecedented arrangement with the White House.

In exchange for 15% of revenues from the chip sales, the two chipmakers will receive export licenses to sell Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips in China, according to the FT.

The arrangement comes as President Donald Trump’s tariffs continue to reverberate through the global economy, underscoring the White House’s willingness to carve out exceptions as a bargaining tool.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with Trump last week, according to the FT.

In a statement, Nvidia told the Financial Times: “We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”

Last week, Trump had said he would implement a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, unless a company was “building in the United States.”

Read the complete Financial Times report here.

Chip giant Nvidia pushed back Sunday in response to allegations from Chinese state media that its H20 artificial intelligence chips are a national security risk for China.

Earlier in the day, Reuters reported Yuyuan Tantian, an account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, said in an article published on WeChat that the Nvidia H20 chips are not technologically advanced or environmentally friendly.

“When a type of chip is neither environmentally friendly, nor advanced, nor safe, as consumers, we certainly have the option not to buy it,” the Yuyuan Tantian article reportedly said, adding that the article said chips could achieve functions including “remote shutdown” through a hardware “backdoor.”

In response, a Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC that “cybersecurity is critically important to us. NVIDIA does not have ‘backdoors’ in our chips that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them.”

Nvidia on Tuesday similarly rejected Chinese accusations that its AI chips include a hardware function that could remotely deactivate the chips, also known as a “kill switch.”

Tensions between the U.S. and China on semiconductor export controls have escalated in recent weeks, even after Nvidia resumed sales of its H20 chip to China. Chinese state media has framed the H20 chip as inferior and dangerous compared to Nvidia’s other chips, while the company has defended its chips.

The company’s resumption of its H20 shipments reversed a previous ban on H20 sales that was placed in April by the Trump administration. Nvidia’s H20 chips — a less-advanced semiconductor compared to its flagship H100 and B100 chips, for example — were developed by Nvidia for the Chinese market after initial export restrictions on advanced AI chips in late 2023.

U.S. export controls on some Nvidia chips are rooted in national security concerns that Beijing could use the more advanced chips to gain an advantage broadly in AI, as well as in its military applications.

Chinese officials, meanwhile, are pushing for the U.S. to ease export controls on high-bandwidth memory chips as part of a trade deal before a possible summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has supported Trump’s policies while also lobbying for export licenses for the H20 AI chip. Huang has said he wants Nvidia to ship more advanced chips to China, underscoring his outspoken stance that Nvidia’s chips becoming the global standard for AI computing is ultimately better for the U.S. to retain market dominance and influence over global AI development.

China is among Nvidia’s largest markets. Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on its unsold H20 inventory in May and has warned that its topline guidance for the July quarter would have been higher by $8 billion without the chip export restrictions.

Nvidia shares were up 1% to close at $182.70 on Friday and are up 36% this year.