SoftBank CEO’s Bad Bets Left Him in Despair. An AI Spree Has Him Back on Top.
In an interview, Masayoshi Son shrugs off an AI bubble and says a correction would be a good time to invest. ‘Aim for much bigger fish.’
- SoftBank Group became Japan’s most valuable company, ending Toyota’s 23-year reign, due to its AI investment pivot.
- SoftBank Group plans to invest at least $52 billion in French data centers, part of its global AI spending spree.
- SoftBank Group’s AI bets involve complex financial engineering, including a $3.1 billion loan to Son for a personal stake in an OpenAI fund.
PARIS—Billionaire tech investor Masayoshi Son was in despair three years ago—his reputation stained by bad startup bets and his company’s stock price cut in half. He told his investors he cried.
Fast forward to Monday, when Son strode out of a black Mercedes at the Élysée Palace to be fêted by Emmanuel Macron—the fourth world leader to publicly host him in the past two years.
Under ornate glass chandeliers, he boasted to cameras that his Tokyo-based technology conglomerate would unleash at least $52 billion of investment in French data centers, part of his global artificial-intelligence spending spree.
The time has come to “aim for much bigger fish,” Son said in an interview at the Ritz Paris after meeting Macron. A phalanx of Son’s aides sat nearby. “I want to be an architect for the future of mankind.”
His company, SoftBank Group 9984 -10.61%decrease; red down pointing triangle, on Monday became Japan’s most valuable, ending Toyota’s 23-year reign. Son is the country’s richest man—his SoftBank stock is worth about $100 billion, more than four times as much as a year ago.
The times of plenty are owed largely to Son’s decision to bet the SoftBank farm on AI, shifting the company from a hodgepodge of startups, telecommunications and e-commerce to a leading investor in the searing-hot sector.
SoftBank’s reach spans a $64 billion investment in OpenAI, plans for a fleet of data centers, robotics and its chip company Arm, which has surged in valuation after an AI pivot.
Helping fuel the company’s transition: a heavy dose of sophisticated financial engineering and circular transactions that have boosted SoftBank’s spending power and share price. SoftBank is one of the biggest investors in OpenAI and Arm—as well as one of the biggest customers of both companies.
SoftBank would be highly exposed if the AI frenzy falters.
Seated in a gilded salon before he met with Macron again at a conference in Versailles, Son acknowledged that a downturn in the AI market on the order of the dot-com bust “can happen any time.”
Speaking in fervent tones, he declared that “half-good guys will be all gone. Half-believers will be all gone.” He added: “True believers and true value creators survive.”
Like the internet, Son said he believes the AI revolution will only grow over the long term.
“Therefore, we don’t call it a bubble,” said Son. “It’s called evolution. Once evolution happens, it never goes back.”
Son enjoys his fortune from a newly built beaux-arts megamansion that aides compare to Versailles. It contains its own 18-hole golf course and statues of figures including Marcus Aurelius. A fan of Napoleon, Son shows off art featuring the French emperor to guests.
Born in Japan to Korean parents and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, the techno-optimist has been a leading figure in booms and busts for three decades—with his wealth and reputation whipsawing up and down with the cycles.
His style is eccentric. He has told startup founders they needed to spend more money, minutes into an initial meeting. Eschewing staid quarterly earnings presentations, he used to deliver zany slideshows that proclaimed the information revolution would bring “happiness for everyone.” In the pandemic, a slide portrayed surviving startups as winged unicorns escaping a gulch—the “Valley of Coronavirus.”
Son founded SoftBank in 1981, and through much of its history it has largely been a collection of tech investments. His first big breakout came during the dot-com boom, when internet investments made him the world’s richest man for just three days—in his words—before the bubble burst and wiped out 99% of SoftBank’s value.
He charged back thanks to an early investment in Chinese online retailer Alibaba and a debt-heavy purchase of Vodafone’s Japanese unit.
To his shareholders, he invoked Yoda, saying he used gut instinct—the force—to drive investments, including from his $100 billion Vision Fund, the largest tech vehicle ever, launched in 2017.
But Son’s gut was often wrong. Soured investments in WeWork, ride-hailing company DiDi and companies that promised robot-made pizza and Uber for dog walking were all black eyes.
By late 2022, with the tech market in the doldrums, he retreated from public appearances, and underwent a period of soul-searching.
“I was feeling that I’m getting old without enough achievement,” Son said this week. “I was wondering, why should I end my life not feeling satisfied?”
The huge advancements in generative AI, epitomized by the release of ChatGPT, shocked him into action.
Son shed vast holdings of T-Mobile, Alibaba and even Nvidia as he sought to plow money into OpenAI, data centers and robotics.
Staff who previously hunted for iconoclastic founders with promising startups were sent to find AI data-center sites, the energy needed to power them and the chips to run them.
The company’s investments in OpenAI are the largest ever in a private company, $32 billion in 2025 and a further $30 billion this year.
SoftBank’s AI bets are financially complex, use a lot of debt and often involve transactions between the company’s units or entities in which it has large stakes.
SoftBank executives play down the risks of the financing deals, saying the sums are small in the context of a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
A large chunk of the cash SoftBank has plowed into OpenAI has come from borrowing against the swelling value of SoftBank’s stake in Arm Holdings, the chip designer.
Arm in turn has benefited from SoftBank, which paid Arm $704 million in the 12 months through March for an undisclosed chip-development project. SoftBank spending accounted for 60% of Arm’s revenue growth, according to company filings.
Much of Arm’s recent stock growth came after a well-received pivot into AI-focused chip design. An Arm spokeswoman said the “vast majority of Arm’s revenue continues to come from customers outside the SoftBank ecosystem, with growth driven by broad-based demand.”
SoftBank also provides a sizable amount of OpenAI’s revenue. It agreed in early 2025 to pay OpenAI $3 billion a year for a yet-to-be-launched product called Cristal Intelligence.
SoftBank’s first announced tenant in a new data-center push is OpenAI, which signed a lease with SoftBank for a 1.2-gigawatt facility that could cost around $2 billion a year in rent, based on prevailing rates.
Son is in for a personal payday that could run into the tens of billions of dollars if OpenAI’s ascent continues. SoftBank’s board approved a loan to Son of $3.1 billion that gives him a personal stake in the fund SoftBank used to invest in OpenAI. U.S. securities law prohibits public companies from lending to CEOs, though such a deal is allowed under Japanese law.
Son gets 17.25% of profits after SoftBank receives some return on a large portion of its investment. The arrangement means that SoftBank shareholders bear most of the risk, having put up the full $139 billion of the fund.
SoftBank says in its securities filings the arrangement with Son leads to an “enhanced focus on the management of investments” in the fund, which is intended to improve SoftBank’s performance.
David Dai, an analyst at Bernstein, said some deals between SoftBank units are natural given the company’s wide reach in numerous areas of AI.
Eager to raise cash for data centers, Son plans to tap the market’s hunger for companies focused on AI and related uses by spinning off collections of companies within SoftBank. Executives are planning an initial public offering of a robotics unit, Roze AI, for June.
A separate IPO would list SB Energy, a midsize solar-power company that has become a data-center builder. SoftBank has plans in the U.S., including 10 gigawatts of data centers in Ohio next to a $33 billion gas power plant it is developing, which is funded by the U.S.-Japan trade deal.
More debt is likely to play a role, too. Son said in the interview that it will be easy to find financing for 80% or 90%—or more—of the cost of the data centers once SoftBank signs long-term agreements with big tech companies for the facilities.
“It’s a big-size investment but most of the money can come from project finance,” Son said. “We don’t have to put in a lot of our own equity.”
He is sanguine that SoftBank will be a winner from any AI shakeout, which he said could be like a typhoon or an earthquake.
The strong will “survive and then they become 10 times more powerful, 100 times more powerful. That was proved in the history of the dot-com bubble,” he said. “The survivor has grown 100x.”
