Masayoshi Son has no intention of dampening enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. At SoftBank’s annual general meeting, the head of the Japanese conglomerate stated that describing the current AI boom as a speculative bubble is “blasphemy against artificial intelligence”. In his view, the market is only at the beginning of a technological transformation whose full potential has yet to be realised.
This is the latest instalment in a strategy that Son has been consistently pursuing for several years. SoftBank is increasing its involvement in the AI sector through investments in OpenAI, the British chip designer Arm, and the infrastructure necessary for the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence systems. The company is building data centres in the United States, preparing similar projects in Europe and Japan, and is also participating in the Stargate project, which aims to develop large-scale AI infrastructure.
Son argues that the future of AI will depend not only on the models themselves, but above all on access to computing power, energy and data centres. In this context, SoftBank is also considering an investment in Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), seeing an opportunity to develop energy infrastructure to support data centres in Japan.
At the same time, the entrepreneur has announced plans to develop robotics. According to him, the company has already begun producing robots at a facility described as a ‘physical AI factory’. Son claims that SoftBank could be the first organisation in the world to use robots on a large scale to produce more robots.
Son’s optimism is nothing new. In the past, he has weathered both the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the collapse in tech company valuations following the pandemic. Nevertheless, he believes that the current AI revolution could be many times greater than the dot-com era. In recent months, it is precisely thanks to investments in artificial intelligence that SoftBank’s market value has risen significantly, and Son himself has once again found himself at the centre of investors’ attention.
The 68-year-old billionaire states that he has no plans to step back from the business. His goal remains the development of so-called artificial superintelligence, which he defines as a system up to 10,000 times more intelligent than a human. As he emphasised during a meeting with shareholders, the most significant changes are yet to come.
