SoftBank and Apollo discussed a giant fund to invest in data centers, chip factories, and other AI projects, joining a stampede of capital rushing to fund the next digital revolution.
The two talked about setting up a fund of more than $20 billion, people familiar with the matter said, though the talks have cooled since the summer and may go nowhere. The venture would likely involve industry partners including Arm, the chip giant that is majority-owned by SoftBank, the people said. One person familiar with the matter said SoftBank had also had talks with other funding sources, though those with Apollo were the most advanced.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has been looking for a deep-pocketed partner to build a competitor to Nvidia, which dominates the market for high-end AI chips, Bloomberg reported in February. He’s no stranger to giant, bet-the-farm funds that underwrite whole sectors. His $100 billion Vision Fund, launched in 2017, did as much as any investor to inflate the unicorn bubble, and overbet on startups only lightly enabled by tech, like on-demand dog-walking and, famously, WeWork.
Now Son is all in on artificial intelligence, which he says will be 10 times smarter than all of human intelligence by 2030 and 10,000 times smarter a few years after that. He has admitted to asking ChatGPT for investment advice, warned that companies have to “take advantage of it or be left behind,” and in a presentation slide that was puzzling even by Son’s enigmatic standards, compared AI doubters to goldfish.
Representatives for both companies declined to comment.
