SoftBank Maps Out $100 Billion Robotics Spinoff

Every rose has its thorn, and SoftBank’s unwieldy portfolio of AI investments is starting to feel a bit prickly.

Masayoshi Son’s solution? Bundle a bouquet of existing SoftBank bets together into a new venture that exists at the intersection of AI and robotics, name it Roze AI, and take it public sometime in the next seven to 19 months, according to a Financial Times report last week. 

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Just about everyone in the AI world sees so-called “physical AI” as the next great frontier; at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously declared that robots were about to have their “ChatGPT moment.” For SoftBank, Roze AI would represent a critical move to both catch the next AI wave and reduce exposure to the data center infrastructure and frontier model-making it has thus far invested in heavily. Per the FT, key SoftBank lieutenants are growing wary of the company’s costly alliance with OpenAI, with the tens of billions of dollars the group has invested and loaned to the firm potentially weighing on its balance sheet.

Launching Roze, at a valuation as high as $100 billion, might help ease some of the financial burden. The timing could be critical:

• To fund its AI investments, and bets on OpenAI in particular, SoftBank last month signed a $40 billion bridge loan, its largest-ever lending facility denominated solely in dollars, per Bloomberg. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that SoftBank has considered selling its Intel stake to fund its investments; last year, it sold its $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia.
• Roze would feature many of SoftBank’s existing energy, land and infrastructure investments, sources told the WSJ, and would invest in the creation of robots that could, in turn, help with the massive buildout of data centers.

Slice of Life: Yes, that’s robots running AI models created in data centers being used to build more data centers to train more AI models to … well, you get it. Historically, SoftBank’s interest in robots has ebbed and flowed. An early attempt to build a robot dubbed Pepper was canned in 2021, while Zume Pizza, the robot-operated pizzeria startup it backed, shuttered in 2023. But last year, the company agreed to buy ABB’s robotics business, which builds bots for industrial settings, for $5.4 billion; sources told the FT that once the deal closes, ABB could be a centerpiece for Roze.