SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group Corp. is a Japanese multinational investment holding company founded on September 3, 1981, by Masayoshi Son, then 24 years old. Son named the company, initially a software distributor called Nihon SoftBank, envisioning a 'software bank' that would underpin Japan's information society. The company entered publishing in May 1982 with Oh! PC and Oh! MZ magazines, quickly becoming Japan's largest publisher of computer and technology magazines. It went public in 1994 with a valuation of $3 billion.

Key acquisitions include Ziff Davis publishing (1995), Vodafone Japan (2006, rebranded as SoftBank Mobile), Sprint Corporation (2013), and chip designer Arm (2016). In 2017, SoftBank launched the Vision Fund, the largest technology-focused venture capital fund in history, with over $100 billion in committed capital backed by sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East. The company changed its legal name from SoftBank Corp. to SoftBank Group Corp. in 2015.

Products and services span telecommunications (SoftBank Corp., Japan's third-largest wireless carrier with over 45 million subscribers), semiconductor IP (Arm), e-commerce (stake in Alibaba), hospitality (OYO Rooms), coworking (WeWork), robotics (Boston Dynamics), and artificial intelligence. The company also holds a stake in Deutsche Telekom. In January 2025, SoftBank joined OpenAI, MGX, and Oracle to launch Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project in partnership with the U.S. government, announced by President Donald Trump. [edit]