OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son are AI’s new power couple
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In his newly built palace near Tokyo, lined by stone statues of Roman emperors and surrounded by an 18-hole golf course, Masayoshi Son was stewing. After declaring for years the imminent arrival of the artificial-intelligence revolution, the chief executive officer of SoftBank Group had missed out on it.
“I haven’t been able to do anything," he thought, according to a speech he gave to SoftBank investors last year. “Can I just get old like this and die?" As it turned out, all he needed was a new golden boy. And now Son, who has a history of latching onto charismatic startup founders, has found one in Sam Altman.
In what would be the largest-ever investment in a startup, Son is preparing to put as much as $43 billion toward Altman’s OpenAI in a pair of transactions. SoftBank is in talks to invest between $15 billion and $25 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a blockbuster $40 billion funding round, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The round would value OpenAI at up to $300 billion—nearly double its valuation in October and an undeniable sign of Son’s confidence in its prospects.
In addition, the Japanese tech and investment conglomerate has committed $18 billion toward Stargate, a venture to build cloud computing centers for OpenAI to use, according to people familiar with the matter. For Altman, who was traveling to Tokyo on Thursday, the tie-up provides him with a deep-pocketed backer at a critical moment. His company’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest investor to date and longtime exclusive technology partner, has been fraying over OpenAI’s contention that it wasn’t getting enough cloud computing power.
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