“Every year $5 trillion, or 800 trillion yen, you might think that’s a lie, but I am confident that’s what it will cost.” That was Masayoshi Son on Tuesday, at SoftBank’s annual corporate conference in Tokyo, telling the room what building artificial intelligence will require each year by 2040. Yet, he did not say how he arrived at the figure.
The justification he offered was ratio rather than arithmetic. “The business model will be viable because by 2040, if AI revenue makes up 20% of global GDP, spending 800 trillion yen a year is a rounding error,” he said, a sentence that quietly does all its work in the first four words.
On the question that follows him everywhere now, he was blunt. “Asking if AI is a bubble is absurd. I don’t think people who ask that question know what AI is about.”
This is a familiar register. Son has previously called the same question blasphemy, and told shareholders at the group’s June annual meeting that it amounted to an insult. The escalation is in the adjectives, not the argument.
What sits underneath the rhetoric is a balance sheet with unusual concentration. SoftBank’s cumulative investment in OpenAI is set to exceed $60bn before the end of 2026, funded in part by a $40bn bridge loan syndicated across a group of banks.
