After missing out on Nvidia, Masayoshi Son is finally going to expand his AI layout.

According to insiders, SoftBank has recently been in talks with banks, hoping to finance $10 billion to invest in energy-related projects and explore how to buy a large number of Nvidia GPUs. According to SoftBank's plan, it will first establish a special purpose company (SPV), then SPV will borrow money from banks to buy GPUs and invest in energy projects, and then rent the GPUs to SoftBank. This loan structure ensures that SoftBank will remove the debt from its balance sheet.

This means that as one of the world's largest technology investors, SoftBank hopes to increase its investment in AI infrastructure and take a share from it.

Due to the increasing demand for electricity in AI data centers, SoftBank's interest in energy, including new energy such as solar and nuclear energy, has been growing.

In June, Masayoshi Son said: "Although the progress of chips and data centers has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence, one of the biggest bottlenecks will be electricity. Innovation in renewable energy and nuclear fusion can provide new sources of electricity."

The insider said that SoftBank will ensure the funding of energy-related investments through bank loans and the introduction of other investors.

At the same time, SoftBank has started to build data centers, and last month SoftBank announced plans to build a large-scale AI data center in Osaka, Japan, which can be described as a multi-line blooming in the AI field.

After all, Masayoshi Son regretted missing out on Nvidia as a big dark horse in AI.

On June 21, at the SoftBank annual shareholder meeting, Masayoshi Son reviewed a major investment mistake: he sold all his Nvidia shares too early and missed out on a potential gain of up to $150 billion.

Remembering the things that I missed out on is really frustrating. I regret selling Nvidia stock.

It is reported that SoftBank sold all of its 4.9% stake in Nvidia in 2019 and received a return on investment of $3.3 billion. At the time, Masayoshi Son believed that locking in returns was a wise move, and the cost of SoftBank purchasing Nvidia shares was only $700 million. If SoftBank had continued to hold Nvidia, its stake’s value today would have been $160 billion. This means that when SoftBank cleared its Nvidia position in 2019, it missed out on more than $150 billion in potential profits.

Now he doesn't want to miss the opportunity for AI to develop further, which is also reasonable.

During the AI start-up financing wave over the past year, Masayoshi Son and the SoftBank Vision Fund were basically in the dark, not participating in the investments of AI unicorns Anthropic and Cohere. An insider revealed that part of the reason was valuation issues, and another part was that SoftBank did not receive explicit instructions from the leadership on how to position AI. The potential reason could be to maintain a friendly relationship with OpenAI, as both Anthropic and Cohere are OpenAI's competitors.

The insider also revealed that Masayoshi Son even prevented the SoftBank Vision Fund from investing in Mistral, an open-source model developer, because he believed it might jeopardize SoftBank's relationship with OpenAI. This also means that Masayoshi Son has sent a signal to the Vision Fund team, that it should not continue to invest in large language models that may compete with OpenAI. Masayoshi Son had already communicated with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the collaboration on the development of AI hardware devices.

From these clues, it can be inferred that Masayoshi Son did not directly enter the development of large models, but went to lay out electricity and data centers.