SoftBank's Son says AI needs $5 trillion a year in global infrastructure

At SoftBank World 2026, Masayoshi Son pegged global AI infrastructure — data centers, chips, and energy — at nearly $5 trillion in annual investment and projected 20% of world GDP shifts to AI-related industries by 2040. Son dismissed bubble fears as SoftBank posted a near five-fold jump in fiscal-year profit to 5 trillion yen ($32 billion) on AI gains, with $34.6 billion sunk into OpenAI to date. The number is a bet, not a forecast — it sets the scale of capital SoftBank is trying to mobilize and marks how far the AI-spend thesis has moved from chips to power grids.

Source: bnnbloomberg.ca ↗