SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son made a stunning declaration at the company’s annual general meeting of shareholders, officially scrapping his long-standing plan to retire in his 60s and hand over the reins to the next generation. The 68-year-old Japanese tech investment titan made it clear that to seize the once-in-a-century opportunity presented by artificial intelligence, he will lead the group for at least another 10 to 15 years.<\/p>\n
At the shareholders’ meeting held in Tokyo, Son stated bluntly, “I don’t have time to retire yet.” He pointed out that SoftBank is dedicated to pursuing long-term technologies he believes possess fundamentally transformative power and has revised his original 50-year life plan. He emphasized that the next 10 to 15 years will be a critical period for him to lead SoftBank’s complete transformation from an investment holding company into the world’s leading AI robotics company.<\/p>\n
Scrapping the Retirement Blueprint to Lead the Final AI Charge<\/p>\n
Market sources indicate that Son had repeatedly stated publicly in the past that he would hand over the business to a younger generation while in his 60s and monitor the group’s development from behind the scenes. However, as generative AI has ignited a global tech arms race over the past two years, the entrepreneur hailed as a “venture capital god” has clearly changed his mind. SoftBank’s results for the fiscal year ended March 2026 gave him ample justification to stay on the battlefield. According to the latest financial report released by SoftBank, the group’s consolidated net profit for the 2026 fiscal year surpassed \u00a55 trillion (approximately $31.0 billion), setting a new all-time high record.<\/p>\n
Behind this stellar performance is SoftBank’s extremely heavy bet on the AI sector in recent years. Arm, the chip design giant in which the group holds nearly a 90% stake, has become a pivotal player in the era of AI computing. Simultaneously, SoftBank has committed approximately $65 billion to OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and has poured hundreds of billions of dollars globally into building the data centers and related infrastructure required to support AI computation.<\/p>\n
The Ultimate Computing Power Battle on Earth: Dismissing Musk’s Space Data Center Concept<\/p>\n
While sprinting full speed ahead on AI infrastructure, Son also offered a rare, sharp critique of another tech maverick, Elon Musk, regarding his space plans. When asked by a shareholder whether SoftBank would emulate SpaceX by building data centers in orbit, Son gave a negative answer.<\/p>\n
Son began by praising Musk as a “remarkable agent of change,” but he quickly pivoted, stating that the concept of building data centers in space has “little value.” He analyzed that while solar power in space could drastically cut electricity costs, electricity bills account for only a small fraction of a data center’s total operating costs compared to expensive hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs). The transportation cost of launching tens of thousands of tons of servers and equipment into orbit is astronomically high, and when combined with subsequent maintenance difficulties and unavoidable communication latency, the economics of a space-based data center simply do not add up.<\/p>\n
“In the AI race, the next few years are far more important than what might happen a decade from now,” Son stressed. He stated that SoftBank’s strategy is to “strike first,” and the group will concentrate all its resources on building “powerful” and absolutely competitive data centers on the Earth’s surface. He predicted that this intense AI technology race will ultimately be decided on the ground.<\/p>\n
From Chips to Robots: SoftBank’s AI Ecosystem Layout<\/p>\n
SoftBank’s AI ambitions extend beyond cloud computing and large language models. Son is actively extending his reach into real-world robotics applications. SoftBank has agreed to acquire ABB’s robotics division for approximately $5.4 billion, thereby filling a critical piece of the puzzle in the industrial automation sector.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, market sources indicate that SoftBank is in preliminary talks with robotics startup Agile Robots, intending to participate in its new funding round, which is sized at $800 million. More notably, SoftBank plans to establish an AI and robotics company named Roze. According to people familiar with the matter, SoftBank’s goal is to set up a subsidiary in the United States and push for its listing as early as this year or 2027 to capture market share in this rapidly growing field.<\/p>\n
Son acknowledged that competition in the AI industry is intensifying, but he believes there is still enormous room for growth, including for OpenAI, its competitor Anthropic, and Google. He asserted that the AI industry is still in its early, nascent stages and that the future market size has at least “tenfold or even a hundredfold” growth potential.<\/p>\n
Beyond the group-level strategic layout, SoftBank’s telecommunications business unit is also showing strong ambition. SoftBank Corp. President Junichi Miyakawa revealed that the unit, Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier, is preparing to enter the US market for “computing power cloud” services and data center energy storage batteries. This demonstrates that SoftBank is constructing its AI empire comprehensively, from capital investment and physical infrastructure to end-user application services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son made a stunning declaration at the company’s annual general meeting of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[157],"tags":[91233,91234,587,684,2325,202,812,734,71206,682,613,31053,3356,2986,207],"class_list":["post-211746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-masayoshi-son","tag-abb-robotics-division","tag-agile-robots","tag-anthropic","tag-arm","tag-blue-origin","tag-elon-musk","tag-google","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-junichi-miyakawa","tag-masayoshi-son","tag-openai","tag-roze","tag-softbank-corp","tag-softbank-group","tag-spacex"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117202279708991946","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}