Reporting by Song Jianan
As of June 2, Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker shows SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son’s net worth has surged to $100.7 billion. He’s leapfrogged Indian titans like Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, reclaiming the top spot in Asia for the first time in over a decade.
The rally didn’t happen by accident. SoftBank’s shares jumped as much as 14.71% yesterday, pushing the conglomerate’s market cap to 48 trillion yen (roughly $306 billion). That’s enough to dethrone Toyota, which had sat comfortably at the top for more than twenty years with a valuation hovering around 46 trillion yen. By the time Tokyo’s markets closed today, SoftBank’s valuation had climbed even higher to 49.30 trillion yen, leaving Toyota at 44.92 trillion yen.
The spark behind this massive valuation jump came straight from Son himself. Speaking at the “Choose France” investment summit in Paris on Monday, he unveiled a staggering €75 billion blueprint for AI data centers. The initial phase alone commands €45 billion, targeting a 3.1-gigawatt compute capacity by 2031, with room to scale up to 5 gigawatts. You could say this announcement was the exact catalyst that sent SoftBank’s stock—and Son’s personal fortune—skyrocketing.
SoftBank’s playbook for this rollout is already taking shape in northern France’s Hauts-de-France region, specifically around Dunkirk, Bouchain, and Busigny. The project brings heavyweights like EDF and Schneider Electric to the table, leveraging France’s cheap nuclear power to solve the biggest headache in AI: massive electricity consumption. Outside of its massive Stargate push in the U.S., this easily marks SoftBank’s single largest AI investment in Europe to date.
Lately, Son has been quietly but aggressively assembling every piece of the AI puzzle. From large language models and mid-tier general-purpose compute chips to the foundational data center infrastructure, he’s building out a full-stack AI ecosystem.
On the application side, SoftBank has already poured over $64 billion into OpenAI, securing roughly a 13% stake. That makes them the second-biggest external backer, right behind Microsoft. This bet has paid off spectacularly. Driven by OpenAI’s soaring valuation, SoftBank’s Vision Fund logged $46 billion in investment gains for fiscal 2025. Just in the fourth quarter alone, the fund pulled in around $20 billion in profits, with almost every single dollar tied back to OpenAI.
When it comes to silicon, Son made a bold move in March 2025, dropping $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Ampere Computing. Founded by ex-Intel execs, Ampere specializes in high-performance, energy-efficient data center CPUs built on Arm architecture, already shipping in bulk to AWS and Microsoft Azure. Now that the deal is closed, Ampere’s hardware will mesh perfectly with SoftBank’s Arm IP, giving the group a serious edge in cloud compute and finally plugging that long-standing gap in their infrastructure.
On the in-house hardware front, Arm officially rolled out its AGI-optimized CPU architecture back in March. By leaning on Arm’s near-total dominance of the mobile chip market (controlling over 90% of global IP licenses), they’re rapidly breaking into cloud AI chips. This strategic pivot is exactly why institutional investors are so bullish on SoftBank’s long-term upside.
Beyond Europe, SoftBank is teaming up with OpenAI and Oracle to build the $500 billion Stargate supercompute initiative in the U.S., effectively locking in a dual-continent footprint for next-gen AI infrastructure.
If this feels familiar, it’s because Son has been here before. Back in 2014, Alibaba’s blockbuster IPO delivered an epic payday for SoftBank’s early stake, catapulting Son’s net worth to $16.6 billion. He instantly became Japan’s richest man and cemented his place among Asia’s financial elite.
But the ride got bumpy. Massive write-downs from Vision Fund flops like WeWork and ride-hailing ventures, combined with a brutal pullback in Alibaba’s stock, dragged his wealth down for years. During that stretch, he consistently fell behind Uniqlo’s Tadashi Yanai and a wave of Indian industrial magnates.
This latest wealth explosion, however, is a completely different story. It’s fueled entirely by a massive market re-rating of AI assets. Since Son holds roughly 33.74% of SoftBank, that single-day stock surge alone tacked over $12 billion onto his personal net worth.
The numbers back up the hype. SoftBank’s full-year fiscal 2025 earnings, released in May, showed net profit hitting 550.8 billion yen—a 4.7% year-over-year jump and the highest annual profit in the company’s history. It comfortably smashed their own internal guidance of 543 billion yen.
At the same time, SoftBank is aggressively trimming the fat. They’ve been steadily offloading non-core holdings like T-Mobile and leftover Alibaba shares, funneling hundreds of billions back into the AI space. Executives didn’t mince words on their earnings call: more than 80% of capital spending over the next three years will go straight to AI infrastructure and chip development. Their mid-term roadmap is equally aggressive, targeting 1.7 trillion yen in operating profit by fiscal 2031, all riding on the successful rollout of their AI ecosystem.
During the 2025 annual shareholder meeting, Son laid out a crystal-clear decade-long vision: transform SoftBank into a top-tier global platform for Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). He’s aiming to rival the ecosystem dominance of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, doubling down on an all-in strategy across the entire AGI value chain.
Son’s conviction is backed by his own staggering forecasts. He predicts that by 2035, super AI will boast computing power ten thousand times greater than human intelligence. Realizing that vision, he argues, will require 200 million advanced chips, $9 trillion in capital, and a massive 400 gigawatts of dedicated power. That’s the exact blueprint driving his relentless investments in compute, data centers, and semiconductor companies.
SoftBank’s market cap leapfrogging Toyota isn’t just a corporate milestone; it’s a snapshot of Japan’s capital markets fundamentally rewriting the rules. For decades, Toyota ruled as the undisputed king, rewarded for its hybrid tech leadership, global manufacturing footprint, and rock-solid cash flows. But in 2026, global capital has decisively pivoted toward compute power and AI infrastructure, and SoftBank is riding that wave straight to the top.
The contrast was stark on June 1. Toyota’s shares slipped 4.37% as slowing global car demand and skyrocketing EV transition costs weighed heavily on valuations. In the space of a single trading session, Japan’s stock market officially crowned a new champion.
