The primary days of the second Trump administration supplied the newly elected president an opportunity to share the highlight with a few of his most vital allies. Whereas among the featured leaders had been ones you’d count on—cupboard nominees, congressional leaders, megadonor Elon Musk—a minimum of one was a shock: Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire tech investor.
The event for Son’s star flip within the White Home Roosevelt Room on Jan. 21 was an announcement that SoftBank Group, Son’s Tokyo-based conglomerate, would put up a lot of the funding for Stargate, an bold partnership with OpenAI and Oracle that goals to turbocharge American management in synthetic intelligence. Flanked by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and standing on a field to be seen above the lectern, Son promised Trump that Stargate would make investments a staggering $500 billion to construct a nationwide community of knowledge facilities, energy crops, and analysis facilities. Trump lavished reward on “my friend Masa” for bankrolling “the largest AI infrastructure by far in history.”
“This the beginning of a golden age for America,” Son advised Trump. “We wouldn’t have decided [to invest] unless you won.”
It’s additionally a golden age for playing on AI, and Son appears decided to be the desk’s highest curler. SoftBank is main a funding spherical of $40 billion for OpenAI, valuing it at $300 billion, in what may very well be a document single spherical for a personal firm. If finalized, that funding would place SoftBank as one in all OpenAI’s largest shareholders. In the meantime, SoftBank and OpenAI are launching a three way partnership to develop and market AI in Japan.
(On March 31, after this story was initially revealed, SoftBank mentioned it had agreed to steer a funding spherical of as much as $40 billion in OpenAI International, a for-profit subsidiary of the ChatGPT maker, valuing the corporate at $300 billion, in what may very well be a document single spherical for a personal firm. SoftBank plans to speculate as much as $30 billion within the subsidiary, with a syndicate of co-investors offering the remaining $10 billion.)
The surge is all of the extra placing as a result of in some circles Son is finest know for his failures. Certainly, the final time Son loomed so massive in international headlines was in 2022, when his Imaginative and prescient Fund posted a $27 billion loss and teetered on the point of collapse. Amongst its most spectacular debacles: office-sharing startup WeWork, for which the fund was pressured to write down down $14 billion.
However the comeback is classic Son. Over time, he has made and misplaced bigger fortunes than maybe any investor within the historical past of capitalism. From his early days as a scrappy software program distributor, Son has demonstrated a aptitude for grand gestures, an unshakable religion in charismatic younger founders with large concepts—and the capability to bounce again from failed bets. It’s not far fetched to check him to a daruma, a conventional Japanese doll that’s a logo of perseverance. Daruma dolls have heavy, weighted bases; like America’s Weebles, they wobble however don’t fall down.
The wobble-and-rebound sample has recurred all through Son’s profession—and every boom-and-bust cycle has appeared to go away his monetary base extra stable. SoftBank’s first large success was a guess on Yahoo, darling of the dotcom increase, which cemented Son’s popularity as a enterprise visionary and made him, briefly, the world’s richest man. Then Yahoo made a string of strategic errors, the increase went bust, and SoftBank’s market capitalization plummeted from greater than $180 billion to $2.5 billion, a decline of 98%.
Son clawed his approach again because of a $20 million funding, made only a month earlier than the dotcom crash, that gave SoftBank a 34% stake in a then obscure Chinese language e-commerce startup, Alibaba. Son famously claims to have determined to speculate primarily based on pure intestine intuition after a six-minute assembly with founder Jack Ma. “It was the look in his eye, it was ‘animal smell,’” he recalled years later.
At its peak in 2020, SoftBank’s Alibaba stake was price greater than $200 billion, enabling SoftBank to borrow cash for investments in a whole bunch of different ventures. In Japan, the corporate pioneered the enlargement of high-speed web and broadband, simply in time to serve one of many world’s most tech-savvy youthful generations. In 2006 SoftBank acquired Vodafone Japan, later rebranding it as SoftBank Cellular, a game-changing transfer that successfully put Son in charge of one in all Japan’s prime telecom suppliers. That success paved the way in which for SoftBank to purchase a majority stake in Dash, which Son later merged with T-Cellular, creating the third-largest U.S. cellular service.
Son’s luck appeared to expire after 2017 when he launched the $100 billion Imaginative and prescient Fund, the world’s largest tech funding fund, with main backing from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The fund’s myriad wipeout losses ultimately pressured Son to unload lots of SoftBank’s belongings, together with the majority of its stake in Alibaba.
But when Son is unnerved by these gyrations, he has not often proven it. He lives in a lavish mansion in Tokyo’s expensive Azabu Juban neighborhood, and in 2019, whilst SoftBank’s fortunes had been straining underneath the load of WeWork’s failed IPO, he took out a private mortgage from SoftBank to pay $117 million—then probably the most ever paid for a U.S. residential property—to accumulate a sprawling European-style villa in Woodside, within the hills above Silicon Valley.
When it fits him, Son, who shows samurai swords and armor from his private assortment in his workplace atop SoftBank’s Tokyo headquarters, will be as intimidating as any feudal warlord. Anthony Tan, cofounder of Southeast Asian tremendous app Seize, remembers being summoned to Tokyo for a gathering with Son in 2014. After an hour, Son reduce to the chase: He was making Tan a proposal he shouldn’t refuse. “You take my money, good for me, good for you,” Tan remembers Son saying. “You don’t take my money, not so good for you.” (Tan took the cash.)
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has supplied a succinct rationalization for why tech CEOs have made numerous 11-hour flights from San Francisco to Tokyo to fulfill with Son: “Rather than having their capital cannon facing me, I’d rather have their capital cannon facing behind me.”
Son’s cannon could have misfired at Imaginative and prescient Fund. However what enabled him to reload is the success of one other singular funding: British chip designer Arm Holdings, which SoftBank took non-public in 2016. Since September 2023, when SoftBank listed Arm on the Nasdaq, its market cap has soared to almost $120 billion, enabling SoftBank to pledge a few of its 90% stake as collateral to tackle debt.
SoftBank will want that new ammunition. For Stargate, SoftBank has pledged to supply $19 billion of the preliminary $52 billion in funding commitments for the enterprise in change for a 40% stake. In mid-March, it splashed out $6.5 billion to purchase Ampere Computing, a U.S. chip designer targeted on AI compute. SoftBank’s total AI spending commitments far exceed the $31 billion in money it had on its stability sheet on the finish of final yr. The Info studies that SoftBank is in talks with bankers to borrow $16 billion to speculate, along with $18.5 billion it lately organized to borrow, secured by its Arm stake.
The bigger query looming over the Stargate guess is whether or not it will likely be definitely worth the returns. On Jan. 27, solely six days after the White Home ceremony, international buyers woke as much as studies that DeepSeek, a little-known startup primarily based in Hangzhou, China, had developed an AI mannequin that performs in addition to or higher than OpenAI’s main mannequin however requires far much less reminiscence and guzzles far much less electrical energy. DeepSeek mentioned it developed the mannequin for lower than $6 million, a fraction of the billions Huge Tech corporations say they’re spending on their fashions.
$19 billion
SoftBank’s preliminary funding dedication for the Stargate AI infrastructure mission
The “DeepSeek shock” challenged prevailing assumptions concerning the correlation between how AI fashions carry out and the way a lot they value. However a lot of the tech group sees these doubts as a distraction from a much bigger fact—that rising demand for AI will create a voracious want for energy and {hardware}, even when AI fashions themselves grow to be extra environment friendly. Altman has argued in a paper on the OpenAI web site that “infrastructure is destiny.”
Clearly, the large estimates of what it can value to construct that infrastructure don’t scare Son. “Some people say, after the DeepSeek syndrome, ‘Oh, you are overspending,’” he mentioned shrugging at a February look with Altman at a SoftBank convention in Tokyo. “‘You know, you can save so much more by spending less.’ But I think you are looking at it the wrong way…How much of global GDP will be replaced by something a billion times smarter?”
Son estimates that inside a decade, AI-driven options will exchange a minimum of 5% of worldwide GDP, and probably as a lot as 10%: “You shouldn’t be scared of spending a few trillion dollars if it returns $9 to $18 trillion per year. Why should you try to be efficient? For what? I don’t get it.”
On the similar occasion, Son reminisced about previous conferences with Altman. In 2017, Altman got here to Tokyo searching for funding, however Son despatched him away empty-handed. Two years later, as OpenAI developed one of many world’s most subtle AI fashions, Son supplied to speculate $1 billion within the enterprise. This time Altman refused.
Onstage, Son had a rosier recollection of the 2019 encounter: “You said that you’re going to go for AGI [artificial general intelligence]. I immediately said, ‘I believe you. I want to invest.’ From there I was a believer. I never doubted. Most people at that time thought you were crazy, right?”
“Some people think you’re crazy too,” Altman replied. “It all works out.”
This text seems within the April/Might 2025 challenge of Fortune with the headline “The nine lives of Masayoshi Son.”
A gambler at tech’s highest-stakes tables
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
