Overview
- The new company, which launched Monday, installs a SoftBank executive as president and brings SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda in as 10%+ shareholders with plans to hire about 100 AI engineers.
- The group plans a trillion-parameter foundation model, a base AI system trained on vast data for many tasks, with a focus on “physical AI” that can control robots and machines rather than chat like a chatbot.
- The firm will seek funding from NEDO, a national R&D agency that has set aside up to ¥1 trillion over fiscal 2026–2030, with banks and industrial players such as MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho, and Nippon Steel investing as minority backers.
- The plan includes converting a former Sharp LCD plant in Sakai, Osaka into a GPU-packed high-performance computing center to keep sensitive industrial data and AI training inside Japan.
- Investors reacted cautiously as SoftBank shares slipped on concerns over heavy spending and unclear near‑term profits, while officials frame the project as a way to close the gap with U.S. and Chinese AI leaders.