Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son has spent over four decades wagering enormous sums on the future of technology, and by the mid-2020s had positioned himself as one of the single largest financiers of global AI infrastructure. As founder, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank Group, and chairman of both chip designer Arm Holdings and the Stargate AI infrastructure venture, Son sits at the intersection of computing hardware, capital markets and frontier AI.

Son studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley, returning to Japan to found SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor. He built the company into a telecoms and internet conglomerate, then became legendary for a single decision: a $20 million investment in Alibaba in 2000 that eventually grew to be worth well over $100 billion, funding much of SoftBank's later ambitions.

In 2016 SoftBank acquired British chip designer Arm Holdings for roughly $32 billion, giving Son control of the architecture underlying most of the world's mobile and increasingly AI processors. The following year he launched the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, the largest technology investment vehicle ever created, deploying capital across hundreds of start-ups worldwide, with mixed results including major losses on bets such as WeWork.

From 2024 Son pivoted SoftBank's strategy decisively toward artificial intelligence, taking Arm public again, investing heavily in AI chip and data-centre ventures, and becoming a lead financial backer of OpenAI. In 2025 he was named chairman of Stargate LLC, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and MGX aimed at building roughly $500 billion of AI data-centre infrastructure in the United States.

Through 2026 Son has continued to argue publicly that the world is chronically underinvesting in AI, estimating that roughly $5 trillion a year is needed globally to meet computing demand, and describing the AI revolution as many times larger than the dot-com boom. His combination of chip ownership through Arm, capital deployment through the Vision Fund, and infrastructure building through Stargate gives him outsized leverage over the resources the AI industry depends on.