SoftBank founder Son makes his biggest bet by staking the Japanese giant’s future on AI
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the SoftBank World event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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.
SoftBank’s big AI plays
For Son, AI seems personal.
“SoftBank was founded for what purpose? For what purpose was Masa Son born? It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI,” Son said last year.
That may go some way to explain what has been an aggressive drive over the past few years — but especially the last two — to put SoftBank at the center of the AI story.
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.”
SoftBank’s stock performance since 2017, the year that its first Vision Fund was founded.
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.
It started with and brain computers and robots
As SoftBank launched “SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision” in 2010, Son spoke about “brain computers” during a presentation. He described these computers as systems that could learn and program themselves eventually.
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.
Vision but bad timing
The market questioned some of Son’s investments in companies like Uber and Didi, which were burning through cash at the time and had unclear unit economics.
But even those investments spoke to Son’s AI view, according to the former partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund.
“His thought back then was the first advent of AI would be self-driving cars,” the source told CNBC.
Again this could be seen as a case of being too early. Uber created a driverless car unit only to sell it off. Instead, the company has focused on other self-driving car companies to bring them onto the Uber platform. Even now, driverless cars are not widespread on roads, though commercial services like those of Waymo are available.
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.
Risk and reward
AI technology is fast-moving, from the chips that run the software to the models that underpin popular applications.
Tech giants in the U.S. and China are battling it out to produce ever-advancing AI models with the aim of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a term with different definitions depending on who you speak to, but one that broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans. With billions of dollars of investment going into the technology, the risk is high, and the rewards could be even higher.
But disruption can come out of no where.
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.
Technology
Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined $21 trillion in market cap
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.
Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images
From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.
The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.
Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.
Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”
There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.
Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.
A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.
The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.
Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.
“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.
Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.
New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”
On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.
Broadcom pops
While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.
Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.
Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.
Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.
“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.
For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.
Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.
Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.
Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.
On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.
But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.
The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.
Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors, who claimed the artificial intelligence startup had illegally accessed their books.
The company will pay roughly $3,000 per book plus interest, and agreed to destroy the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material, according to a filing on Friday.
The lawsuit against Anthropic has been closely watched by AI startups and media companies that have been trying to determine what copyright infringement means in the AI era. If Anthropic’s settlement is approved, it will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, according to the filing.
“This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong,” Justin Nelson, the attorney for the plaintiffs, told CNBC in a statement.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The suit alleged that Anthropic had carried out “largescale copyright infringement by downloading and commercially exploiting books that it obtained from allegedly pirated datasets,” the filing said.
In June, a judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its AI models was “fair use,” but ordered a trial to assess whether the company infringed on copyright by obtaining works from the databases Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The case was slated to proceed to trial in December, according to Friday’s filing.
Earlier this week, Anthropic said it closed a $13 billion funding round that valued the company at $183 billion. The financing was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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