SoftBank Group’s CEO Masayoshi Son said Tuesday that almost $5 trillion in investments will be needed annually and globally to expand data centers, increase production of computer chips and provide energy systems and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence. That’s the scale of the machine now being sold as destiny. The money, the power, the energy demand, the chips, the data centers — all of it gets routed upward through corporate hands while everyone else is told to marvel at the future.
Who Gets to Decide
Son made the pitch at an annual company event in Tokyo, where he dismissed worries about an AI bubble as absurd and said, “To ask whether AI is a bubble is a foolish question.” He added, “AI will transform our lives completely, and do so in a way that generates profits.” That line says plenty. The profits are the point. The transformation is the sales pitch.
He also said, “Those who refuse to evolve are closing down their world. Those who condemn AI are themselves spitting upward.” It’s a neat little sermon from the top, where the people with the capital get to define evolution and everyone else gets mocked for objecting. Son said that in 2040, approximately 20% of the world’s GDP will be replaced by AI-related industries, which he called “the world of superintelligence.”
Son said he has invested tens of billions of dollars in AI-related companies and that SoftBank has been an early supporter of AI. The company oversees a sprawling collection of businesses through what it calls Vision Funds, and its other businesses include telecommunications and energy. SoftBank Group Corp. earlier reported that profits for the fiscal year through March soared nearly five-fold to 5 trillion yen, or $32 billion, from a year earlier as its AI investments paid off.
Who Pays for the Boom
SoftBank has invested $34.6 billion in OpenAI. It sold its stake in Nvidia last year to free up funds for more investments in AI and data centers. The company recently started a battery business in Japan to build next-generation electric power infrastructure in anticipation of growing electricity demand driven by AI use. The infrastructure race doesn’t happen in the abstract. It means more extraction, more construction, more energy systems built to feed corporate appetite.
Reuters reported that Wall Street banks see an AI-driven upcycle in deals and financing, with U.S. lenders benefiting from blockbuster IPOs like SpaceX and volatile markets. The report said JPMorgan’s earnings rose 41% year-over-year, while income from consumer banking climbed 3%. It also said JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon has allocated $175 billion of capital to investment banking and markets, up from $80 billion at the end of 2019, and that assets in the firm’s trading operations surpassed $1 trillion for the first time this year. Bank of America has increased the capital dedicated to its trading unit to nearly $54 billion from $38 billion five years ago. Wells Fargo reported gains in investment-banking and stock-trading revenue of 36% and 64% year-over-year, respectively.
What They Call Stability
The Reuters report said the shift toward investment banking and trading has been building for years, accelerated by a burst of IPO underwriting and trading activity during the pandemic era. It said regulations instituted after the 2008 financial crisis helped non-bank lenders take a larger role in credit markets, pushing traditional financial titans to redirect resources to investment banking and trading. The report said geopolitical uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence are keeping markets active, whether through volatility or efforts to raise huge sums for data centers and related projects.
It also said post-crisis regulations are still primarily focused on lending and credit exposure, while Basel III’s endgame rules would require banks to hold more capital against operational hazards associated with large trading desks and payment businesses. Banks continue to fight those changes, and the report said Wall Street is converging on the same model, raising the risk that banks could sink together if markets turn. That’s the apparatus in motion: profits privatized, risk socialized, and the same institutions that helped build the mess now racing to deepen it.
SoftBank’s numbers, the banks’ numbers, the capital allocations, the trading gains — they all point in the same direction. The people at the top call it innovation. The rest of the world gets the bill, the energy demand, and the instability.