President-elect Donald Trump and Masayoshi Son, president of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, will announce a $100 billion investment drive aimed at boosting artificial intelligence and related infrastructure projects.
The initiative, first reported by CNBC, aims to create 100,000 jobs over four years.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Son announced a similar initiative in 2016, after Mr. Trump was first elected president, that Japanese companies would invest $50 billion in the United States with the aim of creating 50,000 jobs. Agreed. It’s unclear whether SoftBank’s efforts have fully paid off, as many of SoftBank’s numerous startup investments in the U.S. and abroad have failed to pay off. According to a 2019 report from Forbes, hard data on the bottom line impact is difficult to come by. But Axios reports that it has largely achieved its goal, at least temporarily.
SoftBank is now a much smaller company than it was when Trump first took office nearly a decade ago, with just $25 billion in cash on hand, according to Bloomberg News. Questions have arisen as to how Son and his company will raise the promised money.
A SoftBank representative did not respond to a request for comment.
Son joins a slew of tech giants announcing investments in the wake of Trump’s election victory. Earlier this month, Amazon and Facebook’s parent company Meta each announced $1 million contributions to President Trump’s inaugural fund, as did OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AI startup Perplexity. It’s the same.
