Kamal Ghorui
Japan’s second-richest man SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son has reportedly ‘dropped’ plans to buy the US data center operator Switch Inc. According to a report by Bloomberg, SoftBank Group has halted talks about an acquisition of US data center operator Switch, a setback to founder Masayoshi Son’s ambition to roll out Stargate AI infrastructure. according to people familiar with the matter. The deal would have been one of the Japanese company’s biggest to date.SoftBank’s Masayoshi is said to have pursued the Switch deal, of around $50 billion, for months. Masayoshi reportedly believed that direct control of Switch’s network of energy-efficient data centers would help Donald Trump’s $500 billion Stargate project to generate computing power for partner OpenAI. As per analysts, the deal would have given a much-needed boost to the Stargate Project to build US data centers. In January 2025, soon after Donald Trump’s swearing in, Softbank founder Masayoshi had pledged to deploy $100 billion “immediately” alongside OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi’s MGX.“The end of SoftBank’s deal talks with Switch leaves its data center plans in limbo, as Stargate announcements remain few and far between,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kirk Boodry and Chris Muckensturm wrote in a note. A strategic investment or partnership would fall short of the operational exposure that SoftBank has pursued in areas such as semiconductors and physical AI, they said.However, earlier this month, Masayoshi conceded that a full acquisition was off the table and scrapped a planned January announcement. The two companies still are said to be in active discussions about a partial investment or a partnership. Some within the SoftBank camp had reportedly been wary about the size of the deal as well as the logistics of running data center campuses from Las Vegas to Atlanta, the people said.
SoftBank’s big bet on AI
In the past one year, SoftBank has doubled down on its bets in AI. The Tokyo-based company has taken an 11% stake in OpenAI, injecting $22.5 billion just in December 2025. It bought US chip designer Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion and announced a $5.4 billion acquisition of ABB Ltd.’s robotics unit. To finance some of that cost, SoftBank has sold down its T-Mobile US shares. Not just this, the company also has unloaded its entire Nvidia stake to fund its OpenAI stake.SoftBank has also lined up additional liquidity options, including potential asset sales, a PayPay IPO, and margin loans backed by its Arm Holdings Plc stake, to concentrate resources on AI infrastructure projects.
