SoftBank pledges to spend $3 billion annually on OpenAI

Japan’s SoftBank Group will invest $3 billion annually to deploy OpenAI's solutions across its group companies, including semiconductor firm Arm and electronic payment service provider PayPay.

In 2025, the two companies will create an advanced enterprise AI named 'Cristal Intelligence' for large firms, with the Japanese tech giant leading the way as the first customer to implement the technology at scale. The models under this initiative will evolve into autonomous agents, capable of performing tasks for companies independently. Arm's compute platform will offer the necessary performance, efficiency and scalability.

Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, said Cristal will be integrated into all 2,500 systems across its subsidiaries, according to a report by LightReading.


"There are source codes in these systems, and we will have Cristal to read all these source codes that have been developed over the last 30 years. The programmers who wrote them may have passed away already, and you do not know how to rewrite the codes or how to fix the bugs if there are any," he said

"Cristal will figure out what the source code means, what kind of functionality the source code has, and where the upgrade should take place, and the language would be rewritten to the latest one," he added.

The two parties will also explore efforts to secure customer data on the servers of Japan-based AI data centres.

Recently, SoftBank held discussions to invest as much as $25 billion in ChatGPT's parent company, aiming to become the AI firm's largest financial backer.

This is apart from its $15-billion commitment to Stargate.

Last month, SoftBank was in talks to lead a funding round of up to $40 billion for AI developer OpenAI, which was valued at $300 billion.