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SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is looking for investors to help him with a $100 billion plan to boost the global supply of ai-focused processors in an effort to better compete with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Bloomberg reported.
He The project, codenamed Izanagi after the Japanese god of creation and life, could allow SoftBank to invest $30 billion of its own money and the remaining $70 billion from outside partners, including those in the Middle East. , on stage, according to the media. ai-chip-venture” target=”_blank” class=”paywall-full-content invisible”>aggregateciting people with knowledge of the subject.
The news comes as Nvidia, which is scheduled to report fiscal fourth-quarter results on Feb. 21, continues to dominate the ai accelerator market. Nvidia had 92% of the data center GPU market in December 2023, according to ai-companies/#:~:text=NVIDIA%20leads%20the%20data%20center%20GPU%20market%20by%20a%20long,forecasted%20%2416%20billion%20in%20Q4.” target=”_blank”>IoT analyticswhile others such as AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC) account for the remaining 8%.
arm length
SoftBank's son is contemplating that the project could complement Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM), its majority-owned British chip design unit, which it partially spun off to investors last year, the people said. Arm CEO Rene Haas, who is also a member of SoftBank's board of directors, is said to be advising Son on the project.
SoftBank, Arm and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a Searching Alpha request for comment.
Over the past month, Arm shares have shot up 95% thanks to better-than-expected earnings and guidance, benefiting SoftBank and its balance sheet in the process.
Investment firm Daiwa Securities downgraded Arm on Friday following the stock's recent surge. arm actions fell 5% while Nvidia rose 1.9% in afternoon operations.
The son's big bets
Son's efforts on Project Izanagi to create a rival to Nvidia are said to be separate from his plans to work with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise $5 trillion to $7 trillion to boost global manufacturing capacity. of chips and their ability to boost ai.
Son is known for making extraordinary bets and decisions, including SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund, which became the largest technology venture capital fund in history. In 2022, he lost a record $23.4 billion in failed bets on several of his investments, including WeWork (OTC: WEWKQ). (In its most recent quarter, the Vision Fund generated a $4 billion profit, amid a sharp rally in tech stock valuations in recent months.)
“It is a mistake to say that ai cannot be smarter than humans, since it is created by humans,” Son said at the company's global conference in October, adding that he believed that artificial general intelligence, sometimes called general artificial intelligence, would surpass the competition. collective intelligence of humanity and will arrive within the next 10 years.
“ai is now self-learning, self-training and self-inference, just like humans.”
