SoftBank Robotics has started mass production

On June 24, Masayoshi Son, the chairman of SoftBank Group, revealed at the general shareholders' meeting that regarding the application scenarios of physical AI, "mass production of robots has begun in a certain factory and will be officially launched soon. I believe everyone will be surprised."

He also said that SoftBank will become the "overwhelming number one robot company in the world" by bringing together top robot enterprises in various vertical fields. He also mentioned the plan to acquire the robot business of Swiss industrial giant ABB by 2026.

In October last year, SoftBank Group announced that it had reached an agreement with ABB Ltd. to acquire ABB's robot business for a total of $5.375 billion. This transaction disrupted ABB's original plan to spin off the business for an independent listing. The transaction is expected to be completed in the middle to late 2026.

ABB's robot business is one of the "Big Four" in the global industrial robot industry, alongside Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, and KUKA. In 2024, its sales revenue reached $2.3 billion, accounting for about 7% of ABB Group's total revenue, and the operating EBITDA margin was 12.1%. However, this margin level is lower than the 16%-18% margin of ABB Group's core electrification and automation segments. Coupled with the limited synergy between the robot business and other businesses of the group, ABB decided to divest the business to focus more on its core areas.

Masayoshi Son once said that the purpose of this acquisition is to achieve the "integration of super artificial intelligence and robot technology." Some analysts believe that this acquisition also marks SoftBank's determination to make a major comeback in the robot field after the failure of the Pepper robot and the sale of part of its equity in Boston Dynamics, reflecting its long-term belief in the integration of AI and the physical world.

Masayoshi Son has been making a full-industry chain layout in AI in aspects such as large models, mid-range general computing power chips, and underlying data center infrastructure.

At the general shareholders' meeting on June 24, Masayoshi Son revealed that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is advancing a data center project in Ohio, the United States. "A single facility will provide power equivalent to that of 10 nuclear power plants," and it will "build the world's largest data center."

He also said that Arm, a British chip design company under SoftBank, will evolve from a chip designer to a chip provider and will participate in the manufacturing process itself. He predicted that "the AI era in the future will be centered around the CPU" and emphasized that Arm "still has more than 10 times the growth potential." He also mentioned SoftBank's investment of about 300 billion yen in Intel, saying that "it was criticized at the beginning," but now "the profit calculated by market value has reached trillions of yen."

Previously, Masayoshi Son announced a 75-billion-euro AI data center investment plan - an initial investment of 45 billion euros to build a computing power capacity of 3.1 gigawatts by 2031, which can be expanded to 5 gigawatts later.

According to SoftBank, the first batch of sites for this plan are located in Dunkirk, Bouscarrès, and Busnes in the Hauts-de-France region in northern France. The project partners include EDF and Schneider Electric, relying on France's low-cost nuclear power resources to make up for the shortcoming of high power consumption in computing power. This is also SoftBank's largest single AI investment in Europe outside the Stargate computing power project in the United States.

In the field of AI applications, SoftBank has cumulatively invested more than $64 billion in OpenAI, acquiring about 13% of its equity and becoming the second-largest external investor after Microsoft. In the general computing power chip segment, in March 2025, SoftBank announced a $6.5-billion all-cash acquisition of Ampere Computing in the United States. After the acquisition is completed, the company can form a synergistic advantage of chip IP + terminal processors with Arm under SoftBank, making up for SoftBank's shortcoming in cloud general computing power.

In response to the market's doubts about the "AI bubble," Masayoshi Son said at this general shareholders' meeting that "the AI revolution has just begun. Calling it a bubble is a blasphemy against AI." He also claimed that based on the net asset value (NAV), the goal is to achieve a 14-fold increase in the next 16 years, reaching 100 trillion yen. He also announced that "he will work hard for another 10 to 15 years" and abandoned his previous plan to retire at the age of 60.

Currently, SoftBank's performance is good. The full-year performance for the fiscal year 2025 disclosed by SoftBank in May showed that during the reporting period, the company's net profit attributable to the parent company reached 550.8 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%, setting a new record for the company's annual net profit since its establishment and significantly exceeding the previous internal performance guidance of 543 billion yen. During the same period, SoftBank's operating income increased by 7.6% year-on-year to 7.0387 trillion yen, also setting a new record.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Jiemian News", author: Hou Ruining. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.