A few billion dollars in ammunition! Masayoshi Son wants to renew his faith in AI and has approached OpenAI for a discussion.

Arm's successful listing has given Son Masayoshi the opportunity to invest in the booming AI field, which is also a timely blessing for AI companies still in the burning money phase.

On September 16th, according to media reports, SoftBank is seeking to invest billions of dollars in the field of artificial intelligence, and OpenAI is one of the options being considered by SoftBank.

SoftBank is also exploring a series of alternative solutions for OpenAI, including making significant investments in direct competitors of OpenAI. In addition, SoftBank is also considering acquiring Graphcore, a UK-based AI chip manufacturer.

Analysis shows that Arm's IPO on Thursday raised nearly $5 billion in revenue, bringing SoftBank's funds to $65 billion, including its own cash and loans secured by the remaining 90% stake in Arm.

Son Masayoshi returns to "attack mode"

AI is Son Masayoshi's obsession, and since the establishment of the Vision Fund in 2017, he has shouldered the ambition of investing in artificial intelligence.

However, at the beginning of this AI wave, Son Masayoshi was exhausted from dealing with investment failures and massive losses, and SoftBank also entered a "defense mode". Son Masayoshi missed out on this AI frenzy.

In June of this year, after disappearing from the public eye for 7 months, Son Masayoshi returned to the forefront and delivered a speech titled "Initiating a Reversal Offensive", announcing in a high-profile manner that SoftBank is entering "attack mode" and will leverage ARM's advantages in the field of artificial intelligence to make a comeback and eventually "dominate the world". Throughout the speech, concepts such as AI and ChatGPT were almost omnipresent.

Arm's listing has given Son Masayoshi confidence, and he urgently needs a victory to dispel the shadow of investment failures and prove his AI vision.

According to sources close to Son Masayoshi's inner circle, in recent months, his enthusiasm for deals has rebounded strongly. Son Masayoshi hopes to turn SoftBank into a reliable competitor in the field of artificial intelligence, including the chip sector that powers this technology.

A "timely blessing" for AI companies

For AI companies still in the burning money phase, SoftBank's possession of billions of dollars is like a "timely blessing".

In this smoke-filled global AI competition, the current winner is only NVIDIA, which sells computing power upstream. For downstream AI application companies, on the one hand, developing large models requires obtaining and analyzing a large amount of data, which requires tremendous computing power and may cost billions of dollars. On the other hand, many AI companies have not yet found a sustainable and profitable business model.

Even OpenAI, the leader of this AI wave, was once rumored to be bankrupt. Last year, OpenAI only had revenue of $28 million, and due to the development of GPT-4 and ChatGPT, it lost $540 million for the whole year. It was not until February of this year that ChatGPT started to be charged for. However, the growth of ChatGPT users has started to slow down, which poses more challenges for the monetization prospects of OpenAI.

The appearance of Masayoshi Son may bring blessings to OpenAI and even the entire AI industry.

In June, Masayoshi Son stated that he is a "heavy user" of ChatGPT and has established close contact with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Son described Altman as "one of the key figures on Earth" and said that he talks to Altman almost every day.

According to media reports, SoftBank's mobile division has established a business partnership with OpenAI to provide services to Japanese companies that wish to deploy generative AI technologies such as chatbots. In addition, a subsidiary of SoftBank's mobile division expressed its desire to develop its own Japanese version of ChatGPT.