According to the financial news app, WiseWord Finance, SoftBank Group Corp. raised approximately $1.86 billion by issuing US dollars and euros in bonds, marking the investment giant's first foreign currency-denominated bond issuance transaction since 2021. Under the leadership of its founder and leader billionaire Masayoshi Son, this Japanese investment giant, which is globally known for its early heavy investment in Uber and Alibaba, is launching a large-scale investment plan in the field of artificial intelligence technology.

SoftBank said that two rounds of US-dollar-based financing were conducted on Thursday, raising a total of about $900 million, and another two rounds of euro-based financing raised about EUR 900 million (about $964 million) in total. The funds will be used to repay debts and provide funds for the group's investment and operation plans.

SoftBank and its founder Masayoshi Son have recently made multiple investments in artificial intelligence, highlighting their expected accelerated pace of activity in the field. This Japanese investment giant has direct invested about $200 million in Tempus AI Inc. this year. This start-up company utilizes the latest AI technology to analyze medical data for doctors and patients in order to propose better treatment plans.

SoftBank recently invested up to $3 billion in Perplexity AI, a US artificial intelligence start-up focused on 'AI search', which is a cutting-edge field in the artificial intelligence sector. For SoftBank under the leadership of Masayoshi Son, the investment, in Perplexity is the latest bet on the vital and wide open field of artificial intelligence that could lead to 'super artificial intelligence'. Son is betting that Perplexity may become the strongest leader in the forefront field of 'AI search' and rise up to challenge the Google search engine operated by Alphabet Inc.

In Son's opinion, the mission of the SoftBank Group is to help human society progress by realizing the vision of 'super artificial intelligence' (ASI).

SoftBank billionaire founder Masayoshi Son recently outlined an ambitious vision for the future of artificial intelligence, including a commitment to achieving what he calls 'super artificial intelligence'. Son spoke of his desire to create artificial intelligence systems that are thousands of times smarter than humans, marking his biggest declaration since SoftBank's brief exit from the venture capital market following a series of ill-timed bets on start-ups.

At SoftBank's shareholder meeting last week, Son declared that he is ready to go all-in on artificial intelligence and 'go for broke'. Last Friday, Son went further, saying that everything SoftBank has done to date has been 'preparation work' for the AI dream, and the goal of the SoftBank Group is to create 'super artificial intelligence'. He predicted that 'super artificial intelligence' may appear within 10 years and its ability will be thousands of times that of humans.

According to media reports in February of this year, SoftBank plans to invest about $100 billion in artificial intelligence-related chip companies in a super AI chip project called 'Izanagi'. Last week, when a shareholder asked about 'Izanagi', Son said that he will work to achieve his goals but did not provide details. If Son's investment is successful, this AI chip project will be one of the largest investments in the field of artificial intelligence since the emergence of ChatGPT, even surpassing Microsoft's investment of over $10 billion in OpenAI.

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's billionaire founder, recently said that he is seeking to raise up to $100 billion to create a large-scale joint venture chip company that can compete extensively with Nvidia, which currently has a monopoly position in the AI chip field, and provide core chip products necessary for the global development of artificial intelligence.

While Son is seeking investment in artificial intelligence-related fields, SoftBank under his leadership has been exploring ways to use Arm chip design solutions on a larger scale. Son hopes to create a large-scale chip company complementary to Arm, which holds an important position in chip design and is controlled by SoftBank Holdings, and to create an artificial intelligence chip giant with future scale and market share comparable to Nvidia.

SoftBank suffered huge losses due to failed investments such as WeWork, but has been profitable in consecutive quarters. Behind this is the enormous profit brought by investing in Arm. Arm is Masayoshi Son's latest investment representative work after his successful investment in Alibaba many years ago, and Son is obviously ready to continue his heavy bet on artificial intelligence.

Arm has sold licenses for almost all of the core instruction set architectures for mobile smartphone chips worldwide. ARM architecture was mainly used in the smartphone field, but now it is also becoming more frequent in the fields of computer and data center AI server chips. Nvidia's self-developed Grace CPU is based on the ARM architecture. Amazon's self-developed data center Graviton server processor also uses the ARM architecture. Microsoft's latest self-developed customized AI chip, Azure Cobalt 100, is also based on the ARM architecture, specifically designed for running cloud computing workloads on Microsoft's Azure cloud servers. Therefore, riding on the wave of global AI investment boom, Arm's market cap has skyrocketed over 120% this year, reaching a high of $170 billion, with SoftBank holding nearly 90% of the shares.