Let’s cut to the chase: on June 24th, during the shareholder meeting, NUPIAO got the scoop from SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son. He dropped a bombshell about Physical AI applications, confirming that they’ve already kicked off mass production at a factory. The official launch is just around the corner, and he hinted that we’re all in for a real surprise.
But that’s not all. Son laid out a massive ambition: SoftBank aims to become the “overwhelmingly number one robotics company in the world” by bringing together top-tier players from every vertical. And here’s the kicker—he confirmed the plan to finalize the acquisition of ABB’s robotics division by 2026.
Back in October last year, SoftBank Group announced they had struck a deal with ABB Ltd., agreeing to snap up their robotics unit for a total of $5.375 billion. This move effectively scrapped ABB’s original plan to spin off the business for an IPO. Expect the whole transaction to wrap up sometime in the second half of 2026.
The ABB Robotics division is no small fry—it’s one of the global industrial robotics “Big Four,” sitting right alongside Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, and KUKA. In 2024, it raked in $2.3 billion in revenue, making up about 7% of ABB Group’s total income, with an operating EBITDA margin of 12.1%. However, that margin trailed behind ABB’s core electrification and automation sectors, which were pulling in 16%-18%. Plus, the synergy between the robot unit and the rest of the group was limited. All these factors pushed ABB to decide to sell off the division so they could focus tighter on their core strengths.
Son has always talked big about merging “Super AI with robotics technology.” Many analysts see this acquisition as a major turning point. After the stumbles with the Pepper robot and selling off a chunk of Boston Dynamics, SoftBank is now diving back into the deep end of robotics. It really shows how committed they are to the long-term belief in fusing AI with the physical world.
Son isn’t just talking; he’s building. He’s been aggressively laying out the entire AI supply chain, from large models and mid-range general-purpose computing chips to the underlying data center infrastructure.
During that same June 24th shareholder meeting, Son revealed that SB Energy is pushing hard on a massive data center project in Ohio, USA. He claimed a single facility there will provide power equivalent to ten nuclear plants, aiming to build “the world’s largest data center.”
He also shared some juicy details about Arm, the UK chip design giant under SoftBank. Arm is evolving from just a designer to a full-fledged provider, with Son personally involved in manufacturing. He predicts the future of the AI era will be CPU-centric and emphasized that Arm still has over 10x room to grow. He also brought up SoftBank’s roughly 300 billion yen investment in Intel—something that was widely mocked back then—but noted that the profit based on market cap has now skyrocketed into the trillions of yen.
Earlier, Son had publicly announced a staggering €75 billion AI data center investment plan. The first phase involves €45 billion, targeting a compute capacity of 3.1 gigawatts by 2031, with the potential to expand further to 5 gigawatts.
According to SoftBank, the initial sites for this European mega-project include Dunkirk, Boscq, and Boussu in the Hauts-de-France region of northern France. They’ve teamed up with heavyweights like EDF (Électricité de France) and Schneider Electric, leveraging France’s low-cost nuclear power resources to solve the energy-hungry problem of AI computing. This stands as SoftBank’s largest single AI investment outside their US Stargate project.
On the application side, SoftBank has pumped over $64 billion into OpenAI, securing roughly 13% equity. That makes them the second-largest external investor after Microsoft. In the general-purpose chip arena, back in March 2025, SoftBank announced the full-cash acquisition of US-based Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. Once finalized, this creates a powerful synergy between Ampere and SoftBank’s own Arm, combining IP with end-user processors and plugging the gap in cloud computing capabilities.
Facing market skepticism about an “AI bubble,” Son wasn’t backing down at the shareholder meeting. He boldly stated, “The AI revolution has only just begun. Calling it a bubble is an insult to AI.” His goal? To achieve a 14-fold growth in net asset value (NAV) over the next 16 years, reaching a mind-blowing 1 quadrillion yen. To make that happen, he even announced he’s working another 10 to 15 years, officially scrapping his previous retirement plan at age 60.
The numbers speak for themselves. In May, SoftBank released its fiscal year 2025 results, showing a net profit attributable to parents of 550.8 billion yen—a 4.7% jump year-over-year. This sets a new all-time high for annual net profit since the company’s inception, crushing the previous internal guidance of 543 billion yen. Meanwhile, revenue climbed 7.6% to 703.87 billion yen, also hitting a historic peak.
