After Sam Altman, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son joins AI chip race

New Delhi, Feb 17 (IANS) As the generative AI race heats up, SoftBank Founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is reportedly aiming to raise about $100 billion for his AI venture, in a bid to take on graphics chip giant Nvidia.

SoftBank may infuse $30 billion and can raise $70 billion from investment firms in the Middle East, reports Bloomberg, citing sources.

The AI venture would complement the business of UK chip designer Arm, in which SoftBank has a 90 per cent stake after its IPO.

Arm’s shares went up this week after Nvidia disclosed it had acquired a $147.3 million stake in the SoftBank-backed firm.

Arm was acquired by SoftBank for $32 billion in 2016. SoftBank failed to sell it for $40 billion to Nvidia in 2022 amid regulatory hurdles.

Softbank’s Son is not alone in the race to build a next-generation AI venture with billions of dollars.

According to a latest report in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including the UAE government, to raise funds for a tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity.

"The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion,” the report mentioned, citing sources.

Altman has often said there aren’t enough high-end GPUs to power OpenAI’s quest for AI.

Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030.