Softbank will buy a US investor for $4 billion to boost AI

The Japanese telecommunications group Softbank announced this Tuesday that it will buy the US investment firm DigitalBridge for about 620 billion yen (about 4 billion dollars), to build artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

“The acquisition of DigitalBridge will strengthen the foundations of our state-of-the-art AI data center and promote the Softbank group’s vision,” said the CEO of the Japanese company, Masayoshi Son, in a statement. Softbank will acquire the company’s common stock for 16 dollars, a 15% premium over the closing price on the 26th, it added in the note. The Japanese telecommunications and investment group almost tripled its net profit between last April and September, the first half of its fiscal year, to a record 2.92 trillion yen (about 16.386 billion euros), thanks to its investments in AI You can also read:

Record Investment in Artificial Intelligence

According to its financial report published last November, Softbank reported profits of 3.93 trillion yen (€22.054 billion) linked to its investments, largely thanks to the 2.16 trillion (€12.121 billion) received from its investment in the American company OpenAI. Earlier this year, SoftBank agreed to lead a $40 billion investment in OpenAI, creator of the popular generative AI ‘chatbot’ ChatGPT, after signing a strategic partnership agreement with the company. The successive investments it has been making in this field have earned it the position of the second-largest capitalized company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, after recovering last year from four years in the red, recording a net profit of 1.15 trillion yen (about 6.71 billion euros).