SoftBank is said to be in talks to invest an additional $30 billion in OpenAIan agreement that will change the competitive balance of artificial intelligence around the world.
The talks were previously reported by Reuters, citing a report by The Wall Street Journal, and will follow OpenAI's efforts to raise about $100 billion; this round of financing could value the group at around $830 billion.
If the deal goes through, it will be one of the most important AI-related investments to date, and it's a sign that SoftBank wants to have a front row seat to AI, rather than just watching from afar.
It's also typical of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who has always liked to make big, long-term forecasts and investments, and who – assuming the reports are true – would put OpenAI at the center of his technology vision for the next decade.
The size of the potential investment shows how expensive being a leader in artificial intelligence has become.
Training and running more advanced models, such as those generated by OpenAI, requires enormous amounts of computing power, custom chips, and data center resources.
This is one reason why AI companies are now raising money in amounts that were previously rare in the tech industry, much less fighting a war for talent.
Are you ready for a world ruled by robots? It was described by the Wall Street Journal. SoftBank's discussions as part of a broader fundraising campaign with OpenAI however, he stressed that it would need significantly more cash to finance its ambitions on an unprecedented scale.
What's striking is that we're not just talking about funding one company – it's about who gets to build and control the infrastructure of the AI era.
Whichever companies control AI computation and deployment will likely influence not only which industries currently automate work, but also how software is created and the digital services that billions of people around the world depend on evolve.
This is also suggested by a report in the Financial Times SoftBank is close to agreeing to additional financingwhich further suggests that OpenAI's expansion ambitions revolve around megascale investments and partnerships.
Beyond the numbers, the conversations speak to broader changes in artificial intelligence: not just advances in research, but also what it takes for innovation to succeed – access to capital, processing power and energy-intensive computing.
In such an environment, investors like SoftBank don't just put money to work; they also hold positions of power in the future of technology.
Reuters also speculates that investment in this AI data center is part of a broader trend towards an overall expansion of the use of AI in data centers, with key infrastructure goals supporting next-generation AI systems.
If SoftBank follows suit, the move could fuel OpenAI's rapid expansion and intensify competition among AI giants in the United States, China and Europe.
It would also raise new questions about the degree to which AI development is concentrated, in which a few powerful companies, with the backing of huge investors, could end up dominating a technology that increasingly influences everything else.
