He Spent $140 Billion on AI With Little to Show. Now He Is Trying Again

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By Eliot Brown

(The Wall Street Journal) — After global tech investor Masayoshi Son launched the world’s biggest private investment fund six years ago, he said his SoftBank Group was plowing money into companies based on a single strategy.

“We are not just recklessly making investments,” Son told investors in 2018. “We are focusing on one theme, which is AI.”

More than $140 billion spent on 400-plus startups later, an artificial-intelligence mania is sweeping the market — and SoftBank is playing catch-up.

Despite the unprecedented spending spree that Son in 2020 said would make SoftBank “the investment company for the AI revolution,” one of the world’s most prolific tech investors has missed out on the frenzy in generative AI, the red-hot subsector in which products such as ChatGPT learn from huge datasets to create unique text or images.