For more than a decade, Masayoshi Son was defined by the spectacular rise and bruising fall of the Vision Fund’s first era. The man who once bet big on Alibaba but suffered through the debacles of WeWork and Uber has now engineered a staggering comeback. On June 2, the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List revealed Son’s net worth has climbed to $100.7 billion, making him Asia’s wealthiest individual and signaling the market's wholesale endorsement of his all-in pivot to artificial intelligence.
This personal milestone reflects a broader tectonic shift in the Japanese economy. On Tokyo’s stock exchange, SoftBank Group’s market capitalization surged to 49.30 trillion yen, officially dethroning Toyota Motor Corporation as Japan’s most valuable listed company. This ends a twenty-year reign for the automotive giant and suggests that global capital is now prioritizing digital infrastructure and compute capacity over traditional manufacturing prowess.
The catalyst for this valuation leap was Son’s announcement of a 75-billion-euro AI data center initiative in France. Leveraging France’s low-cost nuclear energy via partnerships with EDF and Schneider Electric, SoftBank aims to build a 3.1-gigawatt computing hub by 2031. This project, alongside the ‘Stargate’ supercomputing venture in the United States, positions SoftBank as a primary landlord for the hardware that will power the next generation of generative AI.
SoftBank’s strategy is no longer just about venture capital; it is a full-stack play across the AI value chain. The company now holds a 13% stake in OpenAI, making it the second-largest external investor behind Microsoft. This position alone fueled a massive $46 billion investment gain for the Vision Fund in the 2025 fiscal year, vindicating Son’s belief that large language models are the central nervous system of future technology.
Beyond software, Son has aggressively bolstered SoftBank’s hardware capabilities. The $6.5 billion acquisition of Ampere Computing, paired with the dominance of Arm’s chip architecture, allows SoftBank to offer high-performance, low-power CPUs specifically designed for data centers. By controlling the intellectual property at the chip level and the infrastructure at the data center level, Son is attempting to build an ecosystem that rivals the scale of Silicon Valley’s hyperscalers.
Despite the dizzying numbers, Son’s vision remains focused on the distant horizon of Super Artificial Intelligence (ASI). He predicts that by 2035, AI will possess ten thousand times the intelligence of humans, necessitating $9 trillion in capital and 200 million advanced chips. While critics previously dismissed Son’s grandiosity as hyperbole, the current market frenzy suggests that investors are finally starting to price in his radical vision of the future.