SoftBank, OpenAI Team Up to Develop AI for Japan Business

(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. and OpenAI will create a joint venture to develop and sell AI services to businesses across Japan, establishing one of the broadest efforts yet to sell the fast-growing startup’s tools to enterprise customers outside of the US.

Billionaire SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI chief Sam Altman took to a Tokyo stage Monday 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 $3 billion a year on the US firm’s tools.

The tie-up underscores SoftBank’s emergent role in driving AI development around the world, from leading the $100 billion “Stargate” US endeavor to a years-long effort to build datacenters and support research in its home country of Japan. 

“If more is better, we should do a lot,” Son said. In an apparent nod to the arrival of Chinese startup DeepSeek and its cheaper AI model that’s 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 joins a growing roster of tech leaders including Meta Platforms Inc. to Microsoft Corp. that are spending billions of dollars to lay the foundation for future AI development and use.

SoftBank is teaming up with OpenAI, Oracle Corp. and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX on a multi- billion-dollar project to build data centers and infrastructure in the US for the ChatGPT creator. The Stargate Project plans to spend $100 billion immediately with a target to spend at least $500 billion over the next four years to build more computing power.

Japan, which largely missed the initial wave of growth from the internet, can’t afford to lose another three decades, 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 meltdowns in a country that experiences hundreds of noticeable quakes a year.

Shares of SoftBank rose 1.5% on Monday, reversing losses at the beginning of the day. 

“The world is going to need so much compute,” Altman said. “The most value will be made at the very front of that frontier.”

Son and Altman are scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. The pair were joined at Monday’s press briefing by Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas and Junichi Miyakawa, head of SoftBank’s telecom arm.

Both Arm and SoftBank’s telecom arm are central to Son’s plans to make his mark in AI: Arm’s chip architecture works alongside Nvidia Corp.’s AI accelerators, while SoftBank’s domestic telecom arm has close partnerships throughout corporate Japan.

In the past, Son has scolded Japanese companies for not adopting AI quickly enough, comparing people who refuse to use AI with goldfish, unable to process information like language.

SoftBank’s mobile arm is Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier and has tied up with Microsoft to market OpenAI services in the country, and is working on its own Japanese language chatbot. The telecom firm owns parts of payments arm PayPay, messaging app Line and search engine Yahoo Japan. 

(Updates with executive comments and details from statement)

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