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Japan\u2019s SoftBank Group reported annual net profit of \u00a51.15tn ($7.87bn) for the year ending March 31, 2025, its first since 2020.<\/p>\n
In the latest quarter, the company reported a 240 percent quarter-on-quarter increase in its net profit to \u00a5520bn ($3.53bn). This rounds out a volatile year, which zigzagged between net profit and net loss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
SoftBank\u2019s Vision Funds, the investment vehicles it controls, also made a net profit of \u00a5434bn ($2.98bn) for the financial year despite being down 40 percent YoY. The final quarter saw a net profit of \u00a5177bn ($1.21bn), up from the \u00a5352bn ($2.41bn) loss the previous quarter.<\/p>\n
The fiscal year saw SoftBank aggressively pursue investments across the AI<\/a> industry.<\/p>\n In January, Masayoshi Son’s firm said that it would \u201cimmediately\u201d invest $100bn in Stargate, the data center company formed by OpenAI, alongside other investors like Oracle and MGX. SoftBank\u2019s individual contribution is around $19bn<\/a>. That total investment is supposed to rise to $500bn over the next four years, but details remain unclear<\/a>.<\/p>\n In response to questions about the effect of US tariffs on Stargate\u2019s financing, CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said that \u201cthings are changing every day\u2026 But I don\u2019t think the tariff itself is going to stop the project\u2019s progress\u2026 We would like to wait and see a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n The company\u2019s additions to its data center portfolio included its investment<\/a> in Dayone, the Singapore-based international arm of Chinese data center firm GDS, in December. It also plans to buy<\/a> a former Sharp factory in Japan for $676m to convert it into a 150MW AI data center.<\/p>\n SoftBank also managed to announce its additional investment<\/a> of up to $30bn in OpenAI hours before the close of the financial year. The first funding, finished in April, saw SoftBank invest $10bn in the ChatGPT developer, with an extra $20bn on the way later this year.<\/p>\n $10bn of that remaining investment was originally tied to OpenAI restructuring as a for-profit venture. In May, OpenAI<\/a> said that the company would not become for-profit, initially appearing to have failed to meet SoftBank\u2019s criteria – however, at the same time, the company removed the \u2018cap\u2019 on its for-profit subsidiary, which will become a public benefit corporation (PBC) like Anthropic and xAI.<\/p>\n Goto seemed relatively optimistic in response to queries about SoftBank\u2019s conditional investment, saying: \u201cI don\u2019t think that [the announcement] was a wrong direction, a bad direction,\u201d and that \u201c[SoftBank\u2019s] investment is in the business vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n He also added that \u201cwe are just to wait and see what will happen, not really just on a negative term, but positive term.\u201d<\/p>\n Additionally, SoftBank announced a partnership<\/a> with OpenAI to develop and sell \u2018Cristal intelligence,\u2019 an enterprise AI offering focused on accelerating the development and adoption of AI agents in the workforce.<\/p>\n Chip-related moves include the whole acquisition of Graphcore<\/a>, a British chip designer, for an undisclosed amount, and Ampere<\/a>, a developer of Arm-based CPUs for data centers, for $6.5bn. SoftBank bought<\/a> Arm in 2016 for $32.2bn and currently owns around 90 percent<\/a> of the company after its 2023 IPO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n