Person
Masayoshi Son
Masayoshi Son is the founder and chief executive of SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate whose investments have made him one of the largest financiers of the AI build-out. SoftBank owns Arm, the chip-design company whose architecture is central to much AI hardware, and in January 2025 Son appeared at the White House alongside Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to announce the Stargate Project, a joint venture pledging up to $500 billion over four years for AI data centres in the United States. The scale of that commitment drew immediate scepticism about whether the capital existed — Elon Musk claimed SoftBank had "well under $10 billion secured" — and the venture acknowledged the money would be raised over time. His role in AI is chiefly as a source of capital rather than technology.
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- Compute & infrastructure 4
- Money & business 4
SoftBank agrees to acquire Ampere Computing for $6.5bn
SoftBank's all-cash deal for the Arm-based server-chip maker gave Oracle and Carlyle an exit and deepened SoftBank's push into AI silicon alongside its Arm and Graphcore holdings.
Compute & infrastructure · Money & business
The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle pledged $500 billion over four years for US data centres, announced from the White House.
Compute & infrastructure · Money & business
NVIDIA's $40 billion purchase of Arm collapses
NVIDIA and SoftBank abandoned the deal after the FTC sued to block it; NVIDIA wrote off a $1.36 billion prepayment and Arm began preparing to list instead.
Compute & infrastructure · Money & business
NVIDIA agrees to buy Arm for $40 billion
The $40bn agreed price was $21.5bn in NVIDIA stock and $12bn cash, plus up to $5bn more if Arm hit performance targets; regulators later blocked it.
Compute & infrastructure · Money & business