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 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 telecoms arm, will hire 1,000 people from SoftBank to market OpenAI products to industries from carmakers to retailers.
SoftBank Group companies – including investees such as PayPay and LY – will collectively spend US$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 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,” Son said. In an apparent nod to the arrival of Chinese start-up DeepSeek and its cheaper AI models 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 joins a growing roster of tech leaders including Meta Platforms and Microsoft that are spending billions of dollars to lay the foundation for future AI development and use.
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