Washington: OpenAI and SoftBank Group Corp. are joining forces in a joint venture to sell AI services to businesses across Japan, one of the broadest efforts yet to sell the fast-growing startup’s tools to enterprise customers outside of the US.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman (pictured) is on a global tour jetting between Tokyo, Seoul, New Delhi, Dubai and Germany.
Yesterday, he and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son took to a Tokyo stage to outline a 50-50 venture between OpenAI and SoftBank’s telecom arm SoftBank Corp. before a meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
The venture will hire 1,000 people to market OpenAI products to Japanese industries from automakers to retailers, Son said.
He said SoftBank’s own group companies - including LY Corp. and PayPay Corp. - will collectively use the US company’s tools to the tune of about $3bn a year.
The tie-up underscores SoftBank’s emergent role in driving AI development around the world, from leading the $100 billion Stargate endeavor in the US to a years-long effort to build datacenters in its home country of Japan.
It also points to Son’s embrace of OpenAI’s model of seeking ever-larger troves of data to generate the best outcomes.
“If more is better, we should do a lot. More brain is definitely better,” Son said during a press event, where he shared a Tokyo stage with Altman. He made an apparent nod to the popularity of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s cheaper AI model now challenging the premise underpinning the need for big AI spending: “Some people say you can do small - compressed - but that’s just small.”
SoftBank joins a growing roster of tech leaders including Meta Platforms Inc. to Microsoft Corp. that are spending billions of dollars to lay the foundation for future AI development and use.
“The world is going to need so much compute,” Altman told Son, painting an imminent future of AI breakthroughs in healthcare and robotics. “The returns on a linear increase in intelligence is exponential in terms of value. It takes a lot of capex, but it creates that much revenue.”
Shares of SoftBank closed up 0.5%, erasing losses at the beginning of the day.
Japan, which largely missed the initial wave of growth from the internet, can’t afford to lose another three decades, Son has said.
But the resource-poor country remains constrained in its pursuit of AI by the high price of imported oil and gas.
The public is also wary about nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in a country that experiences hundreds of noticeable quakes a year.
Just weeks before, Altman and Son had appeared alongside US President Donald Trump, who unveiled the companies’ multibillion-dollar project to build data centers and infrastructure in the US for the ChatGPT creator.
With support from Oracle Corp. and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX, the Stargate Project targets spending some $500bn over the next four years to build more computing power.
Ishiba sought feedback on how to strengthen Japan’s AI arena and on an upcoming meeting with Trump later this week, Son said after the closed-door meeting.
The prime minister had earlier praised Son for winning Trump’s “immense trust.”
