The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, has discussed partnerships with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics and has sought tax incentives from U.S. federal and state government officials, Reuters reported Friday (June 20), citing an article by Bloomberg.
Discussions about the project are in their early stages and there’s no guarantee the proposal will move forward, according to the report.
It was reported in March that SoftBank was planning to invest $1 trillion to build AI-equipped factories in industrial parks across the U.S. to provide a solution for American manufacturers that are facing labor shortages.
In December, Son said that SoftBank would invest $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years and that the investment would create at least 100,000 jobs focused on AI and related infrastructure.
While announcing that investment, Son said: “My confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with [then-President-elect Donald Trump’s] victory. President Trump is a double-down president. I’m going to have to double down.”
SoftBank is already a participant in Stargate, the four-year, $500 billion project to build data centers and other AI infrastructure in the U.S.
Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle founder Larry Ellison announced Stargate in January, with MGX being another equity holder and Nvidia, Arm and Microsoft being among the project’s technical partners.
Artificial intelligence data centers are needed because traditional data centers and power grids are struggling to accommodate the intense computational power, data storage and energy required by AI, PYMNTS reported at the time.
It was reported in May 2024 that SoftBank was planning to invest nearly $9 billion in AI and that the company’s outlay for investments and commitments had more than doubled in the 12 months since Son said the company was ready to go on the “counteroffensive.”
SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said at the time: “The reason we’ve been keeping our balance sheet at a very safe level is because we would like to be prepared, and we would like to be flexible if there is anything that we would like to move on.”
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