Masayoshi Son Plans to Raise $100 Billion to Challenge Nvidia - Is Nvidia's New Competitor Coming?
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Masayoshi Son is seeking up to $100 billion in funding for a chip company to compete with Nvidia's AI chips. One proposed plan involves SoftBank contributing $30 billion, with the remaining $70 billion potentially coming from Middle Eastern institutions. The project is named after the Japanese creator and life deity 'Izanagi,' partly because it contains the acronym for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Japan's SoftBank Group. (Visual China Group)
Following OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, another tech industry leader is preparing to raise funds for AI chips. According to a Bloomberg report on February 17, billionaire Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Japan's SoftBank Group, aims to raise $100 billion for an AI chip company to compete with Nvidia.
The report states that Son is seeking up to $100 billion in funding for a chip company to compete with Nvidia's AI chips. The project, led directly by Son, is named after the Japanese creator and life deity 'Izanagi,' partly because it contains the acronym for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
This marks Son's next major venture as SoftBank significantly reduces investments in startups. Insiders reveal that Son aims to establish a company that complements Arm, the UK-based chip design firm under SoftBank. One proposed plan involves SoftBank contributing $30 billion, with the remaining $70 billion potentially coming from Middle Eastern institutions. If the fundraising is successful, this chip project will become one of the largest investments in the field of artificial intelligence since the advent of ChatGPT, dwarfing Microsoft's recent $10 billion investment in OpenAI.
However, insiders revealed that details on how the project will be financed or where the funds will be allocated remain unclear, and the project may evolve further. Masayoshi Son is continuously exploring various investment ideas and strategies to strengthen Arm's influence in the AI market and has been investigating different types of next-generation chips.
The AI gold rush is intensifying, and the battle for AI chips is expected to escalate in 2024. Nvidia, with an 80% market share, nearly monopolizes the AI chip market, while tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, AMD, and Intel are catching up. Sam Altman previously announced plans to seek $5-7 trillion in funding for an AI chip project, aiming to build dozens of chip manufacturing plants in the coming years to enhance global chip production capacity. He has also met with Masayoshi Son regarding this.
However, insiders noted that although Son and Altman have discussed collaboration and financing in semiconductor manufacturing, the current form of Izanagi is independent of Altman's AI chip project. Son once attempted to invest in a company developing AI foundational models and requested its leader to assist in establishing a chip enterprise, but the company declined. People who have worked with Masayoshi Son say he is notorious for suddenly changing his mind, often throwing out numerous names and technologies during meetings. However, Son's passion for AGI has never wavered. He once told a large group of Japanese corporate clients to either adopt artificial intelligence or risk falling behind. For years, he has also been predicting the arrival of AGI in his speeches, believing that a world filled with machines smarter than humans will be safer, healthier, and happier.
"AGI is what every AI expert is pursuing," Son said. But when asked about the detailed definition of AGI, its timeline, computational power, or how much smarter it will be than human intelligence, most people have no answers. "I have my own answer: I believe AGI will become a reality within 10 years."