Sawt Falasteen - SoftBank profit quadruples to $32 bn on AI investments

Tech investor SoftBank, a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, posted net profit of five trillion yen ($32 billion) for the fiscal year ending in March, up from 1.15 trillion yen a year earlier.

The gain from investment in OpenAI contributed to the earnings, it said.

"OpenAI's enterprise value has grown significantly, just as we had anticipated," company CFO Yoshimitsu Goto told reporters.

The gain from its OpenAI investment exceeded six trillion yen, but selling, general, and administrative expenses increased, according to the company.

In February, SoftBank said it would increase its investment in OpenAI by $30 billion, raising its ownership to 13 percent from 11 percent.

Amid the intensifying AI race, Goto said on Wednesday that SoftBank "remains focused on its efforts with OpenAI", when asked about potential investments in rivals such as Anthropic.

The company is also advancing its push to build AI data centres, announcing plans in March for a major new gas-fired power plant in the US state of Ohio to supply them with energy.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Masayoshi Son, the company's flamboyant CEO, has held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron on unveiling an ambitious AI-focused data centre project in France in coming weeks.

Son is considering investing several billion dollars in the country as part of a broader rollout of SoftBank's AI infrastructure, according to Bloomberg, with the CEO floating the idea of investing up to $100 billion.

Data centres that can train and run chatbots, image generators and other AI tools are being built on a dramatic scale worldwide as an investment boom into the fast-evolving technology shows no sign of slowing.

In an effort to diversify its positions within AI, SoftBank also acquired last year US semiconductor designer Ampere Computing and the robotics division of Swiss-Swedish industrial giant ABB.

It also announced in December it would acquire DigitalBridge for $4 billion, a US private equity firm specialising in technology infrastructure.

SoftBank's earnings often swing dramatically because it invests heavily in tech start-ups and semiconductor firms, whose stocks are volatile.

As usual SoftBank did not issue a forecast for the full fiscal year.

N.Awad--SF-PST