Masayoshi Son does not think the future of artificial intelligence is in orbit. The SoftBank Group founder told shareholders on 23 June 2026 that there is little merit in building data centres in space, the idea Elon Musk has been championing, and predicted the AI race would be won by compute kept firmly on the ground.
Son made the comments at the annual meeting of SoftBank’s mobile unit, according to Bloomberg, and his case rested on a piece of cost arithmetic rather than any objection to ambition.
The single advantage an orbital data centre offers, he argued, is cheaper electricity, beamed straight from solar panels with no atmosphere in the way.
But power, he noted, is a small slice of what it costs to run a data centre. The expensive part is the hardware, the chips above all.
Whatever a company saved on electricity in space, Son said, it would hand straight back in the cost of hauling everything up there, then maintaining it, then living with the communication delays that come from operating servers hundreds of kilometres overhead.
