AI
SoftBank CEO Plans ‘Super’ AI After Missing the Nvidia Party. Why Arm Stock Can Benefit.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has largely missed out on one wave of the artificial-intelligence boom. He’s determined not to repeat the mistake, and that could be a good thing for chip-design firm Arm Holdings.
Japan’s
SoftBank bought
Arm for $32 billion in 2016. It subsequently tried to add
Nvidia to its portfolio, according to Son’s comments at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Tokyo on Friday.
“There was one theme: ‘I bought Arm. Now I want to buy you, Nvidia,’” Son said.
The deal didn’t work out and SoftBank subsequently sold its stake in Nvidia in 2019, missing out on what could have been $150 billion worth of gains as the chip maker has subsequently soared in value on the role of its chips in training artificial-intelligence systems.
Now Son looks eager to have another go at building an AI giant. He said at the shareholder meeting that he wanted to achieve “artificial super intelligence,” which would be 10,000 times smarter than human intelligence. Arm is likely to be at the heart of that effort.
SoftBank owns about 90% of Arm, which listed its shares in the U.S. last year and had a market value of $168 billion as of Thursday’s close.
Chip makers license Arm’s work and then pay a small royalty for every Arm-designed chip they sell. The company’s designs are ubiquitous in the mobile phone market and it has now set its sights
on expansion in processors for personal computers.
Arm’s exposure to devices set to
integrate AI has driven up the stock price, which has more than doubled since its listing. However, Son is hoping to make the company part of a push to expand into robotics, data centers, and autonomous driving.
SoftBank is setting up an AI division and will have a prototype in the spring of next year, Japan’s Nikkei news agency
reported last month.
Son looks determined not to repeat the same mistake with Arm as with Nvidia. He has said SoftBank intends to own as much of Arm as it can for as long as possible. That limits SoftBank’s potential gains but also reduces the selling pressure on Arm’s stock.