SoftBank Group

• 1. A $20 Million Gamble

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  SoftBank Group began not as a tech empire but as a software distributor founded in September 1981 by then-24-year-old Masayoshi Son. In 2000, Son wired $20 million to a fledgling Chinese internet startup called Alibaba. Fourteen years later, when Alibaba went public in September 2014, that stake had grown to $60 billion. Few bets in modern financial history match the scale of that return, and it set the template for everything SoftBank would become.

  Son built his company from a Yombancho, Chiyoda-ku address in Tokyo, starting with packaged software distribution, then pivoting into technology publishing by May 1982 with the launches of Oh! PC and Oh! MZ, two magazines dedicated to NEC and Sharp computers. Oh! PC alone reached a circulation of 140,000 copies by 1989. By 1994, the company went public at a valuation of $3 billion. What followed was four decades of investments, acquisitions, record profits, and record losses, all centered on Masayoshi Son's conviction that the next phase of human civilization would be built on artificial intelligence and connectivity.

• 2. From Magazines to Mobile

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  SoftBank's logo carries a symbol many visitors overlook. It reproduces the flag of the Kaientai, a naval trading company founded in 1865 near the end of the Tokugawa shogunate by Sakamoto Ryoma. The choice signals something about how Son sees his company, not as a corporation born yesterday but as a vessel for a longer historical mission.

  In 1995, SoftBank purchased US-based Ziff Davis publishing for $2.1 billion and bought COMDEX from The Interface Group for $800 million on the 1st of April 1995. A joint venture with Yahoo! in 1996 produced Yahoo! Japan, which grew into a dominant web property in the country (now LY Corporation). That same year, SoftBank bought 80% of memory manufacturer Kingston Technology. When Kingston's founder-owners John Tu and David Sun announced plans to distribute $100 million of the $1.5 billion windfall to employees, it became an international media story through the 1996 Christmas season. Within a few years, the memory market softened, and SoftBank sold Kingston back to its founders at roughly a third of the purchase price.

  On the 17th of March 2006, SoftBank agreed to buy Vodafone Japan for approximately $15.1 billion, gaining a stake in Japan's $78 billion mobile market. Vodafone Japan had been hemorrhaging subscribers, losing 58,700 customers in January 2005 and 53,200 more in February 2005, while its 3G service held only 4.8% of Japan's 3G market. SoftBank Mobile became the sole official iPhone carrier in Japan when the device launched there in 2008, a partnership that lasted until the iPhone 4S arrived in 2011.

• 3. The Vision Fund Era

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  On the 27th of May 2017, SoftBank and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia partnered to create the SoftBank Vision Fund, a $93 billion vehicle that became the world's largest private equity fund. SoftBank Group itself contributed $28 billion, with $8.2 billion of that sum coming from the sale of approximately 25% of Arm Holdings shares. Saudi Arabia's PIF agreed to inject $45 billion over five years, becoming the fund's largest investor. Other backers included Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Sharp, and Larry Ellison.

  Son's stated ambition was to invest in every company building toward global artificial intelligence, across finance, transportation, real estate, and logistics. He planned to raise $100 billion for a new fund every few years, deploying roughly $50 billion annually into startups. In January 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported SoftBank was weighing an investment of more than $1 billion into WeWork. By August 2017, that commitment had grown to $4.4 billion. In November 2017, SoftBank agreed to invest $10 billion into Uber, and by December a SoftBank-led consortium had secured a $9 billion deal, making SoftBank Uber's largest shareholder with a 15% stake.

  In July 2019, SoftBank announced Vision Fund 2, targeting approximately $108 billion including $38 billion of its own capital, with investors Apple, Foxconn, and Microsoft. Saudi Arabia was excluded from the second fund.

• 4. Arm Holdings and the Chip Wars

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  One month after Nikesh Arora stepped down as Representative Director and President in June 2016, Son announced SoftBank's largest deal to that point: acquiring British chip designer Arm Holdings for more than $32 billion. The acquisition closed on the 5th of September 2016.

  Arm proved to be a central asset in SoftBank's story. In September 2020, American chip company Nvidia announced plans to acquire Arm for $40 billion in stock and cash, a deal that would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition in history. SoftBank Group would have retained a 10% share. The deal collapsed due to regulatory hurdles.

  SoftBank then pursued an IPO. On the 21st of August 2023, Arm filed for a listing on the Nasdaq. Just before the offering, SoftBank bought back a 25% stake from its own Vision Fund for around $16 billion, valuing Arm at over $64 billion. Arm went public on the 14th of September 2023, raising $4.87 billion at a $54.5 billion valuation, with SoftBank retaining 90.6% of the company. By October 2025, SoftBank had agreed to acquire the ABB Robotics division from Swiss industrial company ABB for $5.375 billion, describing it as part of a push into what Masayoshi Son called "Physical AI."

• 5. Losses, Exits, and Rebuilding

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  In March 2021, SoftBank recorded the largest annual profit by a Japanese company in history: a net profit of $45.88 billion, equivalent to 4.99 trillion yen, driven largely by the public debut of Coupang and Vision Fund investment gains. That peak was followed by a sharp reversal.

  In September 2019, WeWork's IPO was canceled. In November 2023, WeWork filed for bankruptcy. In May 2023, losses from the SoftBank Vision Fund widened 70% to a record $32 billion from the prior year. In 2022, SoftBank sold $34 billion worth of Alibaba shares, reducing its stake from 23.7% to 14.6%. Alibaba had once represented 48% of SoftBank's assets; by 2024 SoftBank had cleared its entire 23-year holding, booking an $8.5 billion gain on the final exit. SoftBank fully exited Uber in April-July 2022 and sold Boston Dynamics to Hyundai Motor Group in December 2020 for approximately $880 million.

  In March 2020, Son launched an emergency 4.5 trillion yen ($41 billion) asset sale to fund a share buyback and debt reduction, describing it as "the largest share buyback and the largest increase in cash balance in the history of SBG." After the announcement, SoftBank's share price rose almost 19%. Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund, had bought a $2.5 billion stake in SoftBank in February 2020 and pushed for restructuring and greater transparency around the Vision Fund.

• 6. The OpenAI Pivot

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  By the end of 2025, SoftBank had accumulated approximately $34.6 billion in cumulative investment in OpenAI, acquiring an approximately 11% stake and becoming the startup's third-largest shareholder after the OpenAI non-profit foundation and Microsoft. In October 2025, SoftBank approved a second installment of $22.5 billion to complete a $30 billion OpenAI commitment, contingent on OpenAI completing a corporate restructuring; if restructuring failed, the investment would drop to $20 billion. SoftBank liquidated its entire Nvidia stake, worth $5.8 billion, to redirect capital toward OpenAI.

  In January 2025, SoftBank joined Oracle, MGX, and OpenAI to establish the Stargate Project, a cooperative venture targeting $500 billion in investment to build AI infrastructure in the United States, with a stated goal of creating 100,000 new jobs by 2029. In February 2025, SoftBank and OpenAI announced a 50/50 joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan, designed to deploy OpenAI solutions across SoftBank companies and serve Japanese enterprises, with SoftBank committing $3 billion annually.

  In March 2025, SoftBank agreed to acquire Ampere Computing, a producer of energy-efficient processors for cloud computing and AI, in a $6.5 billion transaction expected to close in the latter half of 2025. In February 2026, SoftBank reported a return to profit, holding an 11% OpenAI stake, and was in talks to invest as much as $30 billion more in a round that would value OpenAI at $750 billion to $830 billion. SoftBank also announced plans to invest up to 75 billion euros to develop 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France, with a first phase of 45 billion euros targeting 3.1 gigawatts in the Hauts-de-France region.