Overview
- SoftBank disclosed at its annual meeting that it has begun robot mass production at a factory and expects to complete its planned acquisition of ABB’s robotics unit in 2026.
- Masayoshi Son said Arm will expand beyond chip design into supplying and participating in manufacturing to reduce reliance on outside chip suppliers.
- The group is advancing very large ground data‑center projects, including a first-phase €45 billion plan in northern France and a U.S. Ohio development that SoftBank says will be powered at a scale comparable to ten nuclear reactors.
- Son publicly rejected Elon Musk’s orbital data‑center concept as economically impractical within the next decade, a view that comes as SpaceX’s post-IPO stock swing has pressured markets and reduced Musk’s reported net worth.
- SoftBank frames these moves as a multi‑year bid to vertically integrate compute, chips and robots built on prior investments such as Ampere and a large OpenAI stake, but the strategy carries high capital and execution risk over a long buildout timeline.