$10 billion! Masayoshi Son once again bets on AI: focusing on chips and electricity

After missing out on the big dark horse NVIDIA, Masayoshi Son is finally ramping up his AI layout.

According to informed sources, SoftBank has recently been in talks with banks, hoping to finance $10 billion to invest in energy-related projects, while also exploring how to purchase a large number of NVIDIA GPUs. According to SoftBank's plan, it will first establish a special purpose vehicle (SPV), then the SPV will borrow money from banks to buy GPUs and invest in energy projects, and then turn around to lease the GPUs to SoftBank. This loan structure ensures that SoftBank will remove the debt from its balance sheet.

This means that as one of the world's largest technology investors, SoftBank hopes to increase its investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure and get a piece of the pie.

With the soaring power demand of AI data centers, SoftBank's interest in energy is growing, including in new energy sources such as solar and nuclear power.

Masayoshi Son stated in June: "While advances in chips and data centers have accelerated the development of artificial intelligence, one of the biggest bottlenecks will be electricity. Innovations in renewable energy and nuclear fusion can provide new sources of power."

The source said that SoftBank will ensure funding for energy-related investments through bank loans and by introducing other investors.

At the same time, SoftBank has begun to build data centers. Last month, SoftBank announced plans to build a large-scale artificial intelligence data center in Osaka, Japan, showing its multi-pronged approach in the field of AI.

After all, Masayoshi Son deeply regrets missing out on the big dark horse of NVIDIA in the AI wave.

On June 21, Masayoshi Son reviewed a major mistake in his investment career at SoftBank's annual shareholder meeting: selling off NVIDIA shares too early, missing out on a potential profit of up to $150 billion.

Thinking about the things I missed, it's really frustrating. I regret selling NVIDIA shares.

It is reported that SoftBank sold all of its 4.9% stake in NVIDIA in 2019 and received a $3.3 billion investment return. At that time, Masayoshi Son believed that locking in the return was a wise move, as SoftBank's cost of buying NVIDIA shares was only $700 million. If SoftBank had held onto NVIDIA, its stake would be worth $160 billion today. This means that when SoftBank sold off NVIDIA in 2019, it missed out on over $150 billion in profit.

Now, it is only natural that he does not want to miss out on the upcoming opportunities in AI development.

In the AI financing wave over the past year, Masayoshi Son and the SoftBank Vision Fund have largely stayed out of it, not participating in investments in AI unicorns Anthropic and Cohere. According to informed sources, part of the reason is valuation issues, while another part is that SoftBank did not receive clear instructions from the leadership on laying out AI. A potential reason could be to maintain a friendly relationship with OpenAI, as Anthropic and Cohere are competitors of OpenAI The informant also stated that Masayoshi Son even prevented SoftBank Vision Fund from investing in Mistral, an open-source model developer, because he believed it could jeopardize SoftBank's relationship with OpenAI. This also indicates that Masayoshi Son sent a signal to the Vision Fund team: that they should not continue to invest in large language models that may compete with OpenAI. This is because Masayoshi Son had previously communicated with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about collaborating on the development of artificial intelligence hardware devices.

From these clues, it can be inferred that Masayoshi Son did not directly enter the development of large models, but instead focused on laying out in the power and data center sectors