SoftBank Joins OpenAI, Oracle in AI Pact Unveiled by Trump
4 hours ago
(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI, and Oracle Corp. are forming a $100 billion joint venture to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure, an effort unveiled with President Donald Trump aimed at speeding development of the emerging technology.
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“We’re starting off with tremendous investment coming into our country at levels that nobody’s really ever seen before,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
The president was joined by SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. The joint venture will deploy $100 billion “immediately” and have a goal of increasing to “at least” $500 billion to build new infrastructure for OpenAI, including data centers and physical campuses, said Son, who will be the venture’s chairman.
Initial equity will come from SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi state investor MGX, with a buildout of the first computing system starting in Texas, SoftBank said. While SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners in the venture, SoftBank will be in charge of financing and OpenAI will oversee operations, it said. Arm Holdings Plc, Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. will provide technology, along with Oracle and OpenAI, it said.
Trump has signaled a wide-ranging approach to ensure US leadership in AI, with pledges to spur private-sector investment by accelerating the permit process and easing other regulations. Those efforts will be steered by tech industry leaders who’ve joined his administration, including incoming AI-crypto czar David Sacks and Elon Musk, who has emerged as one of the president’s closest advisers.
Shares of SoftBank jumped 9.7% in Tokyo on Wednesday, their biggest intraday rise since August, joining rallies in Nvidia, Oracle and Arm. Over 400 shares in the S&P 500 rose during US trading Tuesday, with the gauge up almost 1%, on expectations that Trump would unveil the new AI investment push.
The president said he would use emergency declarations and executive action to help ease construction projects, including through easier access to energy. During their remarks, Trump and the executives highlighted potential applications for AI in health and other fields that would fuel US economic growth.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison said.
Still, the actual scope of new commitments remained unclear.
Son visited Mar-a-Lago just last month to announce that SoftBank would spend $100 billion over the coming presidential term, and Tuesday’s announcement was drawn from that effort, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ellison said some of the data centers being considered for the project were already under construction, and OpenAI has also already extensively outlined plans to invest in AI infrastructure.
Two weeks before taking office, Trump announced a $20 billion investment from Dubai-based billionaire Hussain Sajwani for new data centers across the US. On Monday, shortly after his swearing-in, he rescinded AI guardrails imposed by Joe Biden and signed a series of measures to boost US energy development to meet a surge in power demand from data centers.
But skepticism remains about whether the initiative — dubbed “Stargate” by the companies — actually amounts to a dramatic increase from previous plans. Last month’s announcement from Son stirred questions over where SoftBank would get the capital to fund its initiative. Bloomberg previously reported that SoftBank might tap hyperscalers in a project financing scheme and leverage tens of billions of dollars into hundreds of billions of dollars. The Japanese tech investor had ¥3.8 trillion ($25 billion) in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet at the end of September.
SoftBank may need to put up around $25 billion to $30 billion for its share in this particular project, said Kirk Boodry, an analyst with Astris Advisory. “We expect they will be able to pull in limited partners (likely Middle Eastern money as they did with Vision Fund) whilst asset sales are very likely on the agenda,” he said in a note to investors. “SoftBank can afford it.”
Over the longer-term, however, this may lead to calls for higher yields on future SoftBank bond issues — a key source of funding — because of the rising strain on the Japanese investor’s finances, said Takashi Fujiwara, head of fixed income management and chief fund manager at Resona Asset Management Co.
Since winning a second term, Trump has cozied up to Silicon Valley, with prominent executives including Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai joining him at the US Capitol for his swearing-in ceremony on Monday.
OpenAI’s Altman has spent months trying to form a global coalition among government and industry leaders to support boosting the supply of chips, energy and data center capacity to support the development of AI. The company also pitched the Biden administration on the need for massive data centers that use as much power as entire cities.
SoftBank previously invested in OpenAI’s most recent fundraising round. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told Bloomberg News last month that it was drawn to SoftBank because the company has “access to lots of capital” and is prepared to invest that money, including “in areas like power and data centers.”
In an interview on Fox News late Tuesday, Ellison noted Stargate has been in the works “for a long time.” Construction is already underway on the first such data centers in Texas, Ellison said, and they’ll be turned over to Altman — and presumably OpenAI — “to start training their next model.”
“The scale of this investment obviously is huge,” Altman said. “And what I think that says about the likely progress of the technology, at least what all of us believe, is correspondingly huge.”
Cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc., and Oracle have been racing to expand computing capacity by constructing new data centers. Oracle has already committed billions to build out new data centers — the company is expected to double its capital expenditures this fiscal year to over $14 billion, in large part due to these projects.
--With assistance from Jackie Davalos, Rachel Metz, Min Jeong Lee and Takahiko Hyuga.
(Updates with share reaction, background and analyst commentary)
