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SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the brainchild of the company’s founder Masayoshi Son, has faced a number of headwinds including a slump in technology stocks as a result of rising interest rates, a tough China market and geopolitics.

Kentaro Takahash | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Shares of SoftBank Group rose as much as 15.29% Friday morning, a day after the Japanese investment firm posted earnings that beat analysts’ expectations.

SoftBank’s on Thursday posted its first quarterly profit following four quarters of losses, thanks to big gains at its Vision Fund. For the December quarter, SoftBank’s net income was 950 billion Japanese yen ($6.36 billion), far exceeding LSEG estimates of 196.5 billion yen.

Its flagship tech investment arm the Vision Fund booked investment gains of 600.7 billion Japanese yen, continuing a recovery after record losses in the previous fiscal year.

On Wednesday, SoftBank-owned Arm, which designs chips for smartphones and a range of other devices, beat earnings estimates and offered a strong forecast as AI boom has been boosting sales.

This lifted SoftBank shares, which closed 11.06% higher at 7,350 yen on Thursday, according to LSEG data. They extended gains on Friday and were last trading at 8,090 yen.

Arm is among the beneficiaries of the AI boom that started last year on increased interest in generative AI after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. Shares of the Nasdaq-listed Arm soared nearly 48% on Thursday.

“Arm is convincing more people it is leveraged into AI. This is going to be a very positive inflection point for the story on Softbank stock,” said Oliver Matthew, head of consumer Asia at CLSA, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Friday.

SoftBank's Arm success is almost like a 'white swan' event, CLSA says

SoftBank Group CFO Yoshimitsu Goto on Thursday said the firm has gone through a shift from an Alibaba-focused to an AI-focused portfolio.

SoftBank was known for its early bet on Chinese tech juggernaut Alibaba in 2000, but has cut its stake in Alibaba recently.

According to Goto, SoftBank’s stake in Alibaba had fallen to nearly zero by the end of the December quarter, down from 50% at the end of December 2019. Meanwhile, Arm’s share in SoftBank’s asset portfolio has risen from 9% to 32% in the same period.

– CNBC’s Vivien Soo contributed to this report.

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Satya Nadella says as much as 30% of Microsoft code is written by AI

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Satya Nadella says as much as 30% of Microsoft code is written by AI

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) speaks with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella after posing for a family picture with guests who attend the “Tech for Good” Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by artificial intelligence.

“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The pair of CEOs were speaking at Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon AI developer event in Menlo Park, California. Nadella added that the amount of code being written by AI at Microsoft is going up steadily. 

Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was coming from AI. Zuckerberg said he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head, but he said Meta is building an AI model that can in turn build future versions of the company’s Llama family of AI models.

“Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,” Zuckerberg said.

Microsoft and Meta together employ tens of thousands of software developers, but they’re the latest companies to discuss how AI is replacing some of the work written by human software developers. 

Since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have turned to AI for a number of tasks, including customer service work, generating sales pitches and software development itself. 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai in October said that more than 25% of new code was written by AI. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees that they will have to prove AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount. Similarly, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on Monday announced in a memo that the language-teaching company will gradually turn to AI in lieu of human contractors. 

Earlier this month CNBC and other outlets reported that OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf, a startup with “vibe coding” software that spits out whole programs with a few words of input. The dream is that with machines helping to write code, organizations will be able to produce more and better software.

WATCH: Amazon forms new unit focused on Agentic AI

Amazon forms new unit focused on Agentic AI

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Samsung flags uncertain economic climate after smartphone, chip sales power quarterly results beat

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Samsung flags uncertain economic climate after smartphone, chip sales power quarterly results beat

Photo illustration showing the Samsung Group company logo displayed on a smartphone screen.

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Samsung Electronics‘ operating profit and revenue beat analysts’ estimates Wednesday, as sales of its flagship Galaxy S25 smartphones as well as memory chips rose.

The South Korean company posted a record quarterly revenue, up 10% from a year earlier, while its first-quarter operating profit climbed 1.5%.

Here are Samsung’s first-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

  • Revenue: 79.1 trillion Korean won ($55.4 billion) vs. 78.1 trillion Korean won
  • Operating profit: 6.7 trillion Korean won vs. 6.4 trillion Korean won

First-quarter revenue marginally topped Samsung’s forecast of 79 trillion Korean won, while operating profit also came in higher than the company’s expectations of 6.6 trillion Korean won.

Samsung is a leading manufacturer of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers, and is also the world’s second-largest smartphone maker.

The company flagged macroeconomic uncertainties due to trade tensions and a slowdown in global growth. Samsung expects performance to improve in the second half of the year, “assuming that the uncertainties are diminished.”

South Korea-listed shares of Samsung Electronics were trading down about 0.4%.

Memory business

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had overtaken Samsung in overall DRAM market revenue for the first time, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%.

The report added that this had resulted, in part, from SK Hynix’s dominance in high bandwidth memory or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption.

SK Hynix last week topped quarterly revenue and operating profit estimates on strong demand for its high bandwidth memory offerings.

In its first quarter earnings, Samsung said it experienced deferred HBM demand from customers anticipating the rollout of its latest HBM products.

For the current quarter, Samsung anticipates continued strong demand for AI servers and will seek to strengthen its position in high-value-added products, including HBM. 

Smartphones 

Samsung’s mobile experience and networks businesses, tasked with developing and selling smartphones, tablets, wearables and other devices, reported a increase in sales and profit from the prior year and quarter.

The company credited the growth to the launch of its latest Galaxy S25 smartphone series, which includes AI features.

In the current quarter, the company plans to sustain sales through the launch of a new Galaxy S25 Edge smartphone and said it will continue to expand the AI-powered features offered on its smartphone lineup.

Correction: This story has been revised to reflect that operating profit in the chip segment declined both on a quarter-on-quarter as well as year-on-year basis.

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Waymo, Toyota strike partnership to bring self-driving tech to personal vehicles

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Waymo, Toyota strike partnership to bring self-driving tech to personal vehicles

A Waymo self-driving car, seen with a driver, stops at a red light outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Friday, March 31, 2025.

Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.

“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.

The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales. 

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”

The Toyota tie-up is the latest automotive partnership for Waymo.

The self-driving company has previously worked with automakers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Stellantis predecessor Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler, Hyundai Motor and China’s Geely Zeekr. The partnerships, many of which touted long-term tie-ups, largely resulted in automakers producing modified vehicles for testing or for Waymo to use in its fleets.

The partnership with Toyota will not affect Waymo’s plans to deploy Hyundai and Zeekr vehicles through the Waymo One service in the future, a spokesman for the Alphabet-owned company told CNBC.

Waymo is now serving 250,000 paid rides per week, up from 200,000 in February, before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Waymo is already running its commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin regions.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in first-quarter earnings last week that Waymo has not entirely defined its long-term business model, and there is “future optionality around personal ownership” of vehicles equipped with Waymo’s self-driving technology.

Waymo and Toyota are not the only companies turning their focus to personally-owned autonomous vehicles. When GM announced in December that it was abandoning its Cruise robotaxi business, the company said it would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles.

Toyota previously invested in and partnered with Tesla, Elon Musk’s automaker which now aims to compete with Waymo on driverless tech. Toyota sold the its stake in the EV maker in June 2017.

Tesla, once seen as a pioneer in self-driving tech, does not yet produce cars that are safe to use without a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, criticized Waymo on a recent earnings call claiming the robotaxis are too expensive for mass-production. Musk also promised Tesla will be “selling fully autonomous rides in June in Austin,” using Model Y vehicles with a new “unsupervised” version of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” or FSD systems installed.

— CNBC reporter Michael Wayland contributed to this report.

WATCH: Pichai: Google may offer personal Waymo robotaxis

Pichai: Google may offer personal Waymo robotaxis

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