Billionaire Investor Masayoshi Son Is Already $130 Billion Deep in AI Stocks. Now He Thinks Nvidia Is Undervalued.
If you’re looking for a growth stock investor to follow, it’s hard to find one more prolific than Masayoshi Son, the CEO and largest shareholder in Softbank (OTC: SFTBF), a massive diversified holding company based in Japan.
Among Son’s best-known investments are Alibaba, Yahoo, Uber, DoorDash, WeWork, and Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM), in which Softbank owns roughly a 90% stake.
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That investment in Arm, a chip design company that went public last year, has been one of Softbank’s best investments in its history. Softbank took the company private in 2016 for $32 billion, and today that stake is worth roughly $130 billion. The stock has soared since its IPO last September on strong growth from AI-related demand and in the smartphone market.
Son, who had also invested in Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) but regretfully sold his 5% stake in the chip stock back in 2019, now sees more opportunity in the AI sector. Softbank was one of several investors to participate in OpenAI’s latest funding round, investing $500 million into the ChatGPT creator as part of a round that values the start-up at $150 billion.
Son also made a bold statement on the future of AI at a recent conference.
Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative, Son said, “I think Nvidia is undervalued.” He went on to explain that bearish estimates predict that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will only displace 5% of GDP 10 years from now, which is equal to $9 trillion based on expectations of GDP growth.
According to his thinking, that means that there will be $9 trillion in capital expenditures for those chips and data centers and that the AGI running on that infrastructure would be able to generate $9 trillion in revenue a year at a net profit margin of 50%, meaning it would make $4.5 trillion in profit.
Son also said that getting there would require 200 million chips and that it would demand 400 gigawatts, which is more than what the U.S. currently uses in electricity.
That might seem farfetched, but most tech revolutions seem that way beforehand.
The Softbank chief is known just as much for his failures as for his successes. He was a major investor in WeWork before the global coworking business blew up, and he lost $11.5 billion on that investment. In the dot-com bust, he also lost $77 billion in paper wealth at one point, at the time more money than anybody in history had lost.
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