SoftBank, OpenAI team up to develop AI for Japan Inc
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SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are also partners in Stargate, a US$500 billion venture to build AI capacity in the US.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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TOKYO - SoftBank Group and OpenAI will 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 chief executive Sam Altman took to a Tokyo stage on Feb 3 to outline their 50-50 collaboration. The venture, which will operate under SoftBank’s telecom arm SoftBank Corp, will hire 1,000 people from SoftBank to market OpenAI products to industries from automakers to retailers. SoftBank Group companies – including investees such as PayPay and LY Corp – will collectively spend US$3 billion (S$4.1 billion) a year on OpenAI’s tools.
The tie-up underscores SoftBank’s emergent role in driving AI development around the world, from leading the US$100 billion “Stargate” US endeavour to a years-long effort to build data centres and support research in its home country of Japan.
“If more is better, we should do a lot,” Mr Son said. In an apparent nod to the arrival of Chinese start-up DeepSeek and its cheaper AI model that has challenged the assumptions underpinning the need for big AI spending, he said: “More brain is definitely better. Some people say you can do small – compressed – but that’s just small.”
SoftBank is teaming up with OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX on a multibillion-dollar project to build data centres and infrastructure in the US for the ChatGPT creator. The Stargate Project plans to spend US$100 billion immediately with a target 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, Mr Son has said time and again. But 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 plant meltdowns in a country that experiences hundreds of noticeable quakes a year.
Mr Son and Mr Altman are scheduled to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. The pair were joined at the Feb 3 press briefing by Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas and Mr Junichi Miyakawa, head of SoftBank’s telecom arm.
Both Arm and SoftBank’s telecom arm are central to Mr Son’s plans to make his mark in AI: Arm’s chip architecture works alongside Nvidia’s AI accelerators, while SoftBank’s domestic telecom arm has close partnerships throughout corporate Japan. BLOOMBERG
