SOFTBANK Group’s founder Masayoshi Son is taking the stage in Tokyo on Monday (Feb 3) with OpenAI chief Sam Altman, part of a global push to spur investment in artificial intelligence (AI) supporting infrastructure.
In an event titled Transforming Business through AI, the two will be joined by Arm Holdings chief executive officer Rene Haas and Junichi Miyakawa, the head of SoftBank’s telecom arm. The press release announcing the event did not provide further details, but the Nikkei earlier said that the two will seek the support of hundreds of Japanese companies in a campaign to build data centres, power plants and other AI-supporting hardware.
Son and Altman are scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba later that day.
SoftBank is teaming up with OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX on a multi-billion-dollar project to build data centres and infrastructure in the US for the ChatGPT creator. The Stargate Project plans to spend US$100 billion immediately with a target to spend at least US$500 billion over the next four years to build more computing power.
Japan, which largely missed the initial wave of growth from the internet, cannot afford to lose another three decades, Son has said, time and again. But the resource-poor country remains constrained by the high price of imported oil and gas, while public sentiment is wary about nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in a country that experiences hundreds of noticeable quakes a year.
Shares of SoftBank were down as much as 2.5 per cent on Monday morning in Tokyo. SoftBank’s credit default swaps (CDS), a measure of credit risk, have widened sharply on concerns about the feasibility and financial impact of Stargate. As at 8.50 AM, the midpoint between bids and offers for the company’s five-year CDS was approximately 235 basis points, the highest level since August 2024, according to traders.
Both Arm and SoftBank’s telecom arm are central to Son’s plans to make his mark in AI: Arm’s chip architecture works alongside Nvidia’s AI accelerators, while SoftBank’s domestic telecom arm has close partnerships throughout corporate Japan.
In the past, Son has scolded Japanese companies for not adopting AI quickly enough, saying that people who refuse to use AI will end up akin to that goldfish, unable to process information such as language.
SoftBank’s mobile arm is Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier and has tied up with Microsoft to market OpenAI services in the country, and is working on its own Japanese language chatbot. The telecom firm owns parts of payments arm PayPay, messaging app Line and search engine Yahoo Japan. BLOOMBERG
