Softbank Group Corp and OpenAI would create a joint venture to develop and sell artificial intelligence (AI) services to businesses across Japan, establishing one of the broadest efforts yet to sell the fast-growing start-up’s tools to enterprise customers outside of the US.
Billionaire Softbank founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to a Tokyo stage yesterday to outline their 50-50 collaboration. The venture, which would operate under Softbank’s telecom arm Softbank Corp, would hire 1,000 people from Softbank to market OpenAI products to industries from automakers to retailers.
Softbank said its own group companies — including LY Corp and PayPay Corp — would collectively use the US company’s tools to the tune of about US$3 billion a year.
Photo: Bloomberg
The tie-up underscores Softbank’s emergent role in driving AI development around the world, from leading the US$100 billion Stargate endeavor in the US to a years-long effort to build data centers in its home country of Japan.
“If more is better, we should do a lot. More brain is definitely better,” Son said.
He then made an apparent nod to the popularity of Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s cheaper AI model now challenging the premise underpinning the need for big AI spending.
“Some people say you can do small — compressed — but that’s just small,” he said.
Softbank joins a growing roster of tech leaders including Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp that are spending billions of dollars to lay the foundation for future AI development and use.
“The world is going to need so much compute,” Altman said, painting an imminent future of AI breakthroughs in healthcare and robotics.
“The most value will be made at the very front of that frontier,” he said.
Shares of Softbank closed up 0.5 percent yesterday, erasing losses at the beginning of the day.
Softbank is teaming up with OpenAI, Oracle Corp and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX on a multibillion-dollar project to build data centers and infrastructure in the US for the ChatGPT creator. The Stargate Project plans to spend at least US$500 billion over the next four years to build more computing power.
Japan, which largely missed the initial wave of growth from the Internet, cannot afford to lose another three decades, Son has said.
However, the resource-poor country remains constrained by the high price of imported oil and gas, while public sentiment is wary about nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in a country that experiences hundreds of noticeable quakes a year.
Son yesterday brought a purple crystal onto the stage, an allusion to a metaphor he used when he bought Arm in 2016 as a means to see into the future of technology. The joint venture would market an enterprise AI called “Cristal intelligence” for Japanese companies, Son said.
Son and Altman were scheduled to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru. The pair were joined at yesterday’s press briefing by Arm CEO Rene Haas and Junichi Miyakawa, head of Softbank’s telecom arm.
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