SoftBank Vision Fund to lay off 20% of employees in shift to bold AI bets, source and memo say

The Vision Fund changes the focus to support Founding Masayoshi Son’s AI goals

Son’s strategy Returns to high -risk, high award -winning investments

Softbank’s AI bets $ 9.7 billion Openai

September 18 (Reuters) – Softbank Group will organize about 20% of the vision fund team, as it shifts its resources to large -scale artificial intelligence bets in the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States. Discounts have pointed out the third dismissal tour of the Japanese Investment Conglomere’s flagship background since 2022. The Vision Fund is currently employing 44 people according to the website. Unlike previous tours, when the group is upset with big losses, the latest discounts come after the declaration of the strongest three-month performance since June 2021 with earnings such as Fund, Nvidia and South Korean e-commerce company Coupang last month. The movement points to a pivota from a wide starting investment portfolio. While the fund continues to make new bets, the remaining personnel will allocate more resources to their son’s ambitious AI initiatives, such as the 500 billion dollar Stargate project, an attempt to create a large US data centers network in partnership with Openai.

A vision fund spokesman confirmed their dismissal without commenting on the details and said in a statement: uz We are constantly adjusting the organization to carry out our long-term strategy-Yapay intelligence and breakthrough technologies to make brave, high addiction investments and create long-term value for our stakeholders. ” Restructuring points to the Oğul’s classic high -risk, high -award -winning, large, concentrated betting, the expansion venture venture, which defines the last period of the vision fund, and the group forced to sell assets and reliability after being damaged after being exposed to office sharing.

This transition, which is made to the capital intensive infrastructure, reflects the place of his son, a Early champion of AI. Now, sometimes making new investments in premium values, foundation models and infrastructure layer.

In the last 12 months, the last has invested $ 9.7 billion in Openai through Vision Fund 2, which has managed a total of $ 65.8 billion. Softbank also plans a intensive infrastructure strategy focusing on crown jewels Chip Designer ARM. He bought Chip companies Graphcore and Ampere Computing and received shares in Intel and Nvidia. These moves aim to create an ecosystem covering chip, data centers and models to support future AI adoption. Capital intensive strategy has the risk of executive attempting both the latest delays in the US Stargate project and a joint attempt similar to Openai in Japan.

Softbank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said the company kept 4 trillion yen (27 billion dollars) in a “very safe level” cash in the company’s latest call for earnings in August.

(Reporting Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)