By Adam Levine
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son stood beside President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Monday and announced a commitment to invest $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years — and create 100,000 jobs. The investments will be concentrated in artificial intelligence.
"My confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory," Son said at the news conference.
SoftBank is an investment holding company with a range of technology investments all over the world, but especially in the U.S. At the end of September, the total value of its investments was $136 billion, so the new commitment would represent a substantial expansion of SoftBank's balance sheet.
Raising that sort of money may prove difficult, but the bigger obstacle could be the commitment on jobs — the focus on AI companies, in particular, complicates the goal. AI companies spend a lot on salaries, but these are some of the most expensive employees in the world right now. And they don't tend to employ a lot of people overall.
OpenAI, which has raised $18 billion and has a private-market value of $157 billion, has 1,372 employees. To fulfill Trump and Son's commitment, in other words, the investments would have to create 73 AI companies on the scale of OpenAI.