At SoftBank Group’s 46th annual general meeting of shareholders in Tokyo, founder and CEO Masayoshi Son delivered an incredibly defiant, fiercely bullish defense of the generative artificial intelligence boom.
Brushing off mounting warnings from Wall Street analysts regarding a potentially overextended market, the 68-year-old billionaire flatly rejected the notion that AI valuations have spiraled into an unsustainable bubble.
1. “An Insult to AI”
Son did not mince words when addressing the growing crowd of skeptics drawing parallels between the current market and the late-1990s dot-com collapse—a crash that famously wiped out 99% of his personal net worth at the time:
“The AI revolution has only just begun. The AI world is only in its third year… I think it’s an insult to AI if you say it’s a bubble. It’s just the beginning. AI’s potential will be unlocked.”
— Masayoshi Son, Founder & CEO, SoftBank Group
Son compared the current phase of the AI market to the earliest days of the internet, arguing that if any investor had the ability to travel back in time, they would have purchased shares of early internet pioneers like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo without an ounce of hesitation. He stressed that the long-term trajectory of the sector will stretch out over the next 50 to 100 years.
2. Doubling Down on the OpenAI Alliance
A major pillar behind Son’s unflinching confidence is SoftBank’s massive, hyper-focused commitment to OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.
[SoftBank Legacy Portfolio] ──► [Aggressive Pivot] ──► [Up to $60B OpenAI Asset Allocation] ──► Foundation for "Superintelligent AI"
SoftBank has quietly consolidated an estimated $60 billion exposure to OpenAI’s operational framework. While the jaw-dropping size of the bet has reportedly triggered mild anxiety among some conservative internal SoftBank stakeholders, Son credits this partnership as the absolute anchor of the company’s future value creation.
Driven by the AI hardware explosion—fueled further by SoftBank’s 90% ownership stake in chip designer Arm Holdings—SoftBank’s shares have experienced a major resurgence. Son repeatedly returned to his long-running analogy, characterizing SoftBank as a corporate “goose” engineered to continuously lay AI golden eggs.
3. The Grand Plan: $61 Trillion & Physical Robotics
Rather than winding down his career, Son revealed he has grown “greedier” and plans to aggressively lead SoftBank into his 70s to build out the era of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)—which he defines as a computing architecture 10,000 times smarter than the human brain.
| Metric / Objective | SoftBank’s Strategic Target |
| 10-Year Net Asset Value Goal | Scale net asset value to an unprecedented ¥61.89 trillion (~$383 billion). |
| Data Center Strategy | Focus entirely on heavy, high-capacity computing grids on Earth (explicitly rejecting Elon Musk’s concepts for space data centers due to heavy chip transport costs and latency). |
| The Physical AI Frontier | Combining the planned 2026 acquisition of Swiss automation giant ABB’s robotics wing with proprietary AI brains to kickstart mass production of general-purpose robots. |
Son teased that automated physical manufacturing tests are already quietly underway at active factory sites, stating confidently to shareholders: “We have already begun mass production of robots at existing factories. I want to make an official announcement soon. Everyone will be surprised.”
