▲ Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group (SBG)
Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of Japan's SoftBank Group (SBG), projected that by around 2040, approximately 1 billion AI-powered humanoid robots will be in operation, and the AI-related market will account for 20% of the combined global GDP.
According to reports from Kyodo News and NHK, Son emphasized during a lecture for affiliates held in Tokyo on July 14 that the center of labor will shift from humanity to robots within the next decade or so.
He predicted that by around 2040, the AI robot market will reach 7 quadrillion yen (approximately 66.4 quadrillion won), accounting for one-fifth of global GDP.
After forecasting an "AI agent economy" where 100 trillion AI agents communicate and work tirelessly, he noted that investment in AI infrastructure—such as data centers, electricity, and semiconductors—required to power such vast AI operations would amount to 800 trillion yen (approximately 7.4 quadrillion won) annually.
Son expressed his intention to strengthen investments in infrastructure, including power and data centers, which are necessary for the proliferation of AI agents.
SoftBank is also known to be entering the AI computing resource leasing business in the United States.
According to Bloomberg, SoftBank Group and its telecommunications subsidiary, SoftBank Corp., announced on July 2 (local time) that they would establish a joint venture named "SB Neo" to provide AI chips and cloud services to large enterprises, including hyperscalers.
The business, dubbed "Neo Cloud," specializes in GPU infrastructure, which is a core resource for AI computation. The goal is to increase data center capacity for large-scale AI model training and inference to 10 gigawatts (GW) by 2030.
Junichi Miyakawa, CEO of SoftBank Corp., stated, "We are considering sites across the United States that can secure sufficient power and are suitable for data centers," adding that if the business succeeds, the target could exceed 10 GW.
Industry insiders reported that this business could boost the annual operating profit of the telecommunications subsidiary by three to four times, reaching a scale of 3 trillion to 4 trillion yen (approximately 28.3 trillion to 37.7 trillion won).
As SoftBank Group has committed to investing a total of 65 billion dollars in OpenAI by October, it is also projected that OpenAI could become a major client for this business. (Photo: Yonhap News)
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