According to reports on June 28th from Caijing, SoftBank Group Corp. raised approximately $1.86 billion through the issuance of US and euro-denominated bonds. This is the investment giant's first issue of foreign-currency denominated bonds since 2021, and SoftBank is investing heavily in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) under the leadership of Masayoshi Son.

SoftBank said it issued two tranches of $900 million U.S. dollar bonds and two tranches of $900 million euro bonds ($964 million U.S. dollars). SoftBank said the funds will be used to repay debt and provide financing for the group's investment plan.

Takashi Nakagawa, a senior credit analyst at information service company Tokai Tokyo Intelligence Laboratory Co., said: "Bond investors are putting money into SoftBank Group because they anticipate the company's future growth potential in the field of artificial intelligence. Since the beginning of this year, the company has issued a large amount of bonds, significantly enhancing its financial flexibility."

Masayoshi Son's "AI Grand Plan"

According to recent reports, it is clear that Masayoshi Son is ready to make big investments in AI.

For example, this Japanese technology company invested $200 million directly in Tempus AI Inc. in April of this year. The latter is a start-up company that analyzes medical data for doctors and patients to provide better treatment options. This Thursday, Masayoshi Son revealed that SoftBank has established a joint venture with Tempus AI to use AI to analyze individual medical data and make treatment recommendations.

"SoftBank and Tempus AI hope to bring treatment and clinical trial recommendations using artificial intelligence to the Japanese market, making Japan another medical care market outside the United States that can provide such services," he said.

In addition, according to sources, Vision Fund 2 of the group will invest $10-20 million in U.S. search start-up Perplexity AI, whose overall valuation has reached $3 billion.

Perplexity, which is a major competitor of Google's search engine, was established less than two years ago. The service it provides is called the "answer engine," which replies to users in text format rather than links.

Earlier reports said that SoftBank is developing a plan to invest about $100 billion in artificial intelligence-related chip companies in a project called "Izanagi," named after a deity in Japanese mythology. Last week, when a shareholder asked about "Izanagi", Masayoshi Son said he would work to achieve results and strive to achieve his set goals, but did not provide further details.

It is worth noting that if Masayoshi Son's investment in AI is successful, this AI chip project will become one of the largest investments in the field of artificial intelligence since the launch of ChatGPT, even making Microsoft's investment of more than $10 billion in OpenAI pale in comparison.

Last week, Masayoshi Son first issued a tough statement saying he was ready to bet everything on artificial intelligence, "whether he wins or loses." He then went on to declare: Everything SoftBank has done before was just a warm-up to realize the dream of AI, and his goal is to create a "super artificial intelligence."

He predicts that 'super AI' is likely to appear within 10 years, and its ability will be 10,000 times that of humans.