SoftBank Plans to Enter the Artificial Intelligence Chip Market

Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, is accelerating his efforts in artificial intelligence, and is currently gathering donations for his next step in that strategy.

According to a report from Bloomberg agency, Son is seeking to obtain $100 billion to build a new project that will compete with companies like Nvidia in the field of artificial intelligence chips.

The new project collaborates with Arm, a chip design company that was turned into a public company by SoftBank last year, and still owns about 90 percent of Arm’s shares as of this month.

The company follows the same rules it used when collecting funds for its large investment funds, Vision Fund.

The report stated that SoftBank plans to leverage institutional investors in the Middle East for around $70 billion of the total amount of $100 billion, while the company itself will contribute the remaining $30 billion.

Currently, Nvidia dominates the artificial intelligence chip market through its graphics processing unit chips.

Given the expected growth in demand for artificial intelligence processors and the need for a lot of work to be done to improve efficiency and cost, there is a clear opportunity for others to compete with alternatives, whether they are similar graphics processing units, new methods for graphics processing units, or different processing approaches.

It is said that the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is also in talks with investors in the Middle East to raise between 5 trillion dollars and 7 trillion dollars for a new project on artificial intelligence chips.

OpenAI’s efforts are notable because the company is a pioneer in developing generative artificial intelligence, whether for powering other services using GPT models or for running its own services, such as ChatGPT.

According to a Bloomberg report, SoftBank’s project appears to be separate from Altman’s ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence chips.

The new chip project aligns with SoftBank’s new focus on artificial intelligence, historically the company has earned a large portion of its profits from early investments and its stake in the giant Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which has brought it over $70 billion over the years.

The company began gradually selling its stake in Alibaba to reinvest the money in artificial intelligence since March 2023, when Yoshimitsu Goto, the financial director of SoftBank, said that the company is preparing to keep pace with the artificial intelligence revolution on the horizon.