Masayoshi Son, chairman and leading government officer of SoftBank Team Corp., speaks on the SoftBank International match in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
Masayoshi Son is making his largest guess but: that his brainchild SoftBank would be the middle of a revolution pushed via synthetic logic.
Son says synthetic superintelligence (ASI) — AI this is 10,000 instances smarter than people — will probably be right here in 10 years. It’s a daring name — however most likely no longer unexpected. He’s made a profession out of fat performs; particularly, one was once a $20 million funding into Chinese language e-commerce corporate Alibaba in 2000 that has made billions for SoftBank.
Now, the billionaire is hoping to copy that good fortune with a order of investments and acquisitions in AI corporations that can put SoftBank on the middle of a basic technological shift.
Presen Son has been outspoken about his seeing over the ultimate age, his considering precedes a lot of his fresh bullishness, in keeping with 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 leading at SoftBank till 2016 and and president till 2019, advised CNBC.
SoftBank’s fat AI performs
For Son, AI turns out private.
“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 stated ultimate age.
That can move a way to provide an explanation for what has been an competitive power over the future few years — however particularly the ultimate two — to place SoftBank on the middle of the AI tale.
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 thinkingabout 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.”
Upcoming, Son said: “In 30 years, I hope robots will become one of the core businesses in generating profits for the SoftBank group.”
SoftBank’s guess on Pepper in the end flopped for the corporate. SoftBank slashed jobs at its robotics unit and prevented generating Pepper in 2020.In 2022, German company United Robotics Team indubitably to procure Aldebaran from SoftBank.
However Son’s very early pastime in robots underscored his interest for AI packages of the hour.
“He was in very early and he has been thinking about this obsessively for a long time,” Sama, who’s writer of “The Money Trap,” stated.
Within the background, Son was once cooking up one thing larger: a tech capitaltreasury that will construct waves within the making an investment global. He based the Eye Treasure in 2017 with a large $100 billion in deployable capital.
SoftBank aggressively invested in firms the world over with one of the largest bets on trip hailing avid gamers like Uber and Chinese language company Didi.
However investments in Chinese language era firms and a few evil bets on corporations like WeWork soured sentiment for the Eye Treasure because it racked up billions of greenbacks of losses via 2023.
Eye however evil timing
The marketplace puzzled a few of Son’s investments in firms like Uber and Didi, that have been burning via money on the month and had hazy unit economics.
However even the ones investments stated to Son’s AI view, in keeping with the previous spouse on the SoftBank Eye Treasure.
“His thought back then was the first advent of AI would be self-driving cars,” the supply advised CNBC.
Once more this might be observable as a case of being too early. Uber created a driverless automotive unit simplest to promote it off. In lieu, the corporate has fascinated about alternative self-driving automotive firms to deliver them onto the Uber platform. Even now, driverless vehicles aren’t prevalent on roads, regardless that industrial services and products like the ones of Waymo are to be had.
SoftBank nonetheless has investments in driverless automotive firms, akin to 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.
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, in keeping with the corporate’s site.
That can move a way to provide an explanation for the fat dangers that Son takes, and his conviction with regards to specific subject matters and corporations — and the valuations he’s keen 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 previous Eye Treasure exec stated.
