As the most recent example of Masayoshi Son's emphasis on the hardware and tools that support artificial intelligence, SoftBank Group Corp. is increasing its holdings in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Nvidia Corp.
According to regulatory records, the Japanese technology investor increased its ownership of Nvidia from $1 billion in the previous quarter to almost $3 billion by the end of March. According to them, it purchased about $170 million worth of Oracle Corp. stock and $330 million worth of TSMC stock.
In the first half of 2025, SoftBank's flagship Vision Fund monetized about $2 billion in both public and private assets. Returns on investment are the Vision Fund's top priority, and SoftBank is not putting any special pressure on it to sell off its holdings.
Arm Holdings Plc is the semiconductor designer at the core of SoftBank's AI goals. In an effort to catch up after mostly missing a historic surge that turned Nvidia into a $4 trillion behemoth and elevated its contract chipmaker TSMC to a valuation of about $1 trillion, Son is progressively assembling a portfolio around the Cambridge, UK-based firm with important industry partners.
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On paper, SoftBank, which releases quarterly results on Thursday, ought to have profited from that wager on Nvidia. Since reaching a year-low in early April, Nvidia's market value has increased by around 90 percent, while TSMC has increased by more than 40 percent.
This helps compensate for missing a large portion of Nvidia's post-ChatGPT surge, which was one of the largest ever.
Long before OpenAI's groundbreaking chatbot, SoftBank was among the first to place bets in artificial intelligence. In early 2019, the company sold a 4.9 percent stake in Nvidia, which is currently valued at over $200 billion.
SoftBank's capacity to be an early investor in generative AI was further hindered by crippling losses at the Vision Fund. Son would be able to reclaim some of the most profitable segments of the semiconductor supply chain if the business were to attempt to buy back some Nvidia shares in addition to those of proxy TSMC.
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With broad collaborations, the 67-year-old founder of SoftBank now aims to take a more active position in the adoption of AI. These include SoftBank's $500 billion venture into the Stargate data center, which also involves OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX, an investment fund sponsored by Abu Dhabi. Son is also pursuing a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona with TSMC and other companies.
Richard Kaye, co-head of Japan equity strategy at Comgest Asset Management and a longtime SoftBank investor, believes that SoftBank could establish a distinctive position without being a manufacturer since Arm's intellectual property powers most mobile chips and is increasingly used in server chips.