According to a recent report by Nikkei Chinese website, the "AI Revolution" proposed by Sun Zhengyi, President and President of SoftBank Group (SBG) in Japan, has begun, with an investment of 10 trillion yen to expand its AI business.

The "AI Revolution" proposed by Sun Zhengyi, which integrates the latest technologies of AI, semiconductors, and robots, brings innovation to all industries. Its core content is the development and production of AI semiconductors that can efficiently process large amounts of data.

The report points out that SoftBank plans to expand its business into industries such as data centers, robotics, and power generation using AI semiconductors as a breakthrough point, with an expected investment of up to 10 trillion yen (approximately RMB 464.09 billion). SoftBank plans to build data centers using independently developed semiconductors in Europe, America, Asia, and the Middle East after 2026.

In fact, facing the huge development prospects brought by the wave of AI and artificial intelligence, SoftBank has made the AI field a key development direction.

SoftBank Group has announced plans to invest a total of 150 billion yen (approximately 960 million US dollars) by 2025 to enhance the computing power of its AI data center, including purchasing GPUs from Nvidia. In a previous earnings conference call, SoftBank CFO Fumio Goto stated that SoftBank's investment portfolio has gradually shifted its focus towards its semiconductor design company Arm.

In addition, SoftBank Group plans to establish an AI chip department within Arm with the goal of manufacturing prototype products by spring 2025. Mass production will be undertaken by contract manufacturers and is expected to begin in the fall of 2025. In the future, once the large-scale production system is established, this business is expected to be spun off and included under SoftBank. It is reported that in order to ensure production capacity, SoftBank has negotiated with companies such as TSMC on manufacturing issues and determined production quotas.

Technology giants place heavy bets on AI

Currently, with the release of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence AI track is rapidly exploding and becoming a hot topic of global attention.

Some institutions predict that the global artificial intelligence market size will reach 638.23 billion US dollars in 2024, and will expand year by year in the coming years. It is expected to exceed 1 billion US dollars by 2027, reaching 107.01 billion US dollars, doubling from 2023 to 2156.75 billion US dollars by 2031.

Driven by the strong demand for AI, major manufacturers are concentrating their efforts to accelerate their layout. Apart from SoftBank, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Technology companies such as Meta have begun to heavily invest in the field of artificial intelligence, increasing their capital expenditures.

Image source: CCTV video screenshot

Among them, Microsoft's capital expenditure in the first quarter of 2024 was $14 billion (exceeding the expected $13.1 billion), a year-on-year increase of 79.4%, mainly invested in the cloud and AI infrastructure fields. However, Microsoft still stated that the expenditure is not enough because the demand for artificial intelligence services is exceeding supply, especially the infrastructure used to deploy artificial intelligence models has not yet met the demand. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood has called for increased capital expenditures and scaling up in the new fiscal year starting on July 1st to meet the growing demand for cloud and artificial intelligence products.

Google's capital expenditure for the first quarter of 2024 was $12 billion, an increase of $1.7 billion from the expected $10.3 billion, mainly for investing in servers and data centers. Google's parent company Alphabet CFO, Borat, stated that it is expected that the company's capital expenditure will remain at a similar level in the coming quarters, and the company is confident in its investment in AI.

According to Meta's first quarter financial report, in order to accelerate AI product development, it plans to increase its capital expenditure for 2024 from the previously predicted $30-37 billion to $35-40 billion, with billions of dollars to be invested in areas such as artificial intelligence and the metaverse. Meta founder and CEO Zuckerberg said, Meta will shift its existing resources towards investing in artificial intelligence to maintain efficient operations.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky stated in his interpretation of the Q1 financial report that capital expenditures will significantly increase this year, especially in the AI sector, with investment in generative AI projects and expansion of AWS capacity.