TOKYO: Japan\u2019s SoftBank Group said Wednesday its annual net profit quadrupled to more than $30 billion, boosted by its investments in AI.<\/p>\n
Tech investor SoftBank, a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, posted net profit of five trillion yen ($32 billion) for the fiscal year ending in March, up from 1.15 trillion yen a year earlier.<\/p>\n
The gain from investment in OpenAI contributed to the earnings, it said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpenAI\u2019s enterprise value has grown significantly, just as we had anticipated,\u201d company CFO Yoshimitsu Goto told reporters.<\/p>\n
The gain from its OpenAI investment exceeded six trillion yen, but selling, general, and administrative expenses increased, according to the company.<\/p>\n
In February, SoftBank said it would increase its investment in OpenAI by $30 billion, raising its ownership to 13 percent from 11 percent.<\/p>\n
Amid the intensifying AI race, Goto said on Wednesday that SoftBank \u201cremains focused on its efforts with OpenAI\u201d, when asked about potential investments in rivals such as Anthropic.<\/p>\n
The company is also advancing its push to build AI data centres, announcing plans in March for a major new gas-fired power plant in the US state of Ohio to supply them with energy.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Masayoshi Son, the company\u2019s flamboyant CEO, has held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron on unveiling an ambitious AI-focused data centre project in France in coming weeks.<\/p>\n
Son is considering investing several billion dollars in the country as part of a broader rollout of SoftBank\u2019s AI infrastructure, according to Bloomberg, with the CEO floating the idea of investing up to $100 billion.<\/p>\n
Data centres that can train and run chatbots, image generators and other AI tools are being built on a dramatic scale worldwide as an investment boom into the fast-evolving technology shows no sign of slowing.<\/p>\n
In an effort to diversify its positions within AI, SoftBank also acquired last year US semiconductor designer Ampere Computing and the robotics division of Swiss-Swedish industrial giant ABB.<\/p>\n
It also announced in December it would acquire DigitalBridge for $4 billion, a US private equity firm specialising in technology infrastructure.<\/p>\n
SoftBank\u2019s earnings often swing dramatically because it invests heavily in tech start-ups and semiconductor firms, whose stocks are volatile.<\/p>\n
As usual SoftBank did not issue a forecast for the full fiscal year.<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOKYO: Japan\u2019s SoftBank Group said Wednesday its annual net profit quadrupled to more than $30 billion, boosted by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[217,215,214,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-21676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-business-of-japan","10":"tag-japans-business","11":"tag-japanese-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}