Vivold Consulting
Funding & Deals

SoftBank's Son is seeking about $100 bln for AI chip venture, Bloomberg reports

SoftBank's Son Seeks $100 Billion for AI Chip Venture

Key Insights

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is reportedly seeking to raise $100 billion for a new AI chip venture aimed at competing with industry leader Nvidia.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

Is SoftBank's $100 Billion AI Chip Bet a Game-Changer?

SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son is reportedly on a mission to raise a staggering $100 billion for a new AI chip venture, setting sights on challenging industry titan Nvidia. This ambitious move underscores SoftBank's commitment to becoming a dominant force in the AI hardware arena.

Why This Matters

  • Massive Investment: A $100 billion fund signals a serious play to disrupt the AI chip market.
  • Competitive Landscape: Entering a field dominated by Nvidia requires not just capital but also innovation and strategic partnerships.

Potential Implications


  • Market Dynamics: If successful, SoftBank's venture could introduce new competition, potentially driving innovation and affecting pricing in the AI chip sector.

  • Investor Sentiment: Such a bold move may influence investor perceptions of SoftBank's strategic direction and risk appetite.
But first, some context: SoftBank has a history of making significant investments in technology sectors, and this latest endeavor aligns with its broader vision of leading in AI and related technologies.

Source: Reuters Technology Roundup

More in Funding & Deals

All Funding & Deals stories

Google's chief scientist walks: Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years, taking three legends with him

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 30th employee, is leaving after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation using AI to automate scientific research - taking co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le (Google Brain), and Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind) with him. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, supplying compute for at least the first year, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-leading the seed. In the same announcement, Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over Gemini model development. Alphabet stock fell about 4%.

Anthropic signs a $10B, six-year compute deal with a startup that didn't exist last year

Anthropic has reportedly signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup founded only earlier this year, per Bloomberg. Volta is partnering with crypto-mining firm Bitdeer to develop the data centre - located in Norway, delivering 133 megawatts, and running Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture - and is a member of Nvidia's Cloud Partner programme. It caps an aggressive capacity spree that also includes recent compute deals with SpaceX and Amazon, as Anthropic races rivals for the scarcest input in the industry.

Airtable sells for $1.28B after an $11B peak - the first big AI-era valuation reset in SaaS

Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash (about $2.25B equity value including net cash) - its first acquisition since a July Nasdaq IPO at an $18 billion valuation. The reset is stark: Airtable raised over $1.4 billion and peaked above $11 billion in 2021, with secondaries reportedly at $4 billion earlier this year, even though ARR grew 20%+ year-over-year to roughly $480 million and it serves 500,000+ organisations including 80% of the Fortune 100. Bending Spoons - owner of Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo - typically buys at a discount, trims staff, and optimises for profit.