Buying Britain’s ARM: a record acquisition for the IoT and AI age (2016)

The gamble of buying a first-rate company from an unrelated field for ¥3.3 trillion

What makes this acquisition striking is that a company whose core was telecommunications and investment poured a record ¥3.3 trillion into semiconductors, an unrelated field — and into a first-rate, profitable company rather than a loss-making one. What Son was looking at was not the results in front of him but a future thirty years out, in which IoT and AI would change the world. If an age were coming in which every device carried a chip, the company holding the design of those chips would occupy something like a tollgate. Buying ARM was a bet to get ahead and seize that tollgate.

Ironically, SoftBank once tried and failed to let ARM go, and by that very failure reaped its largest fruit. ARM, left in its hands when the sale to Nvidia fell through, roughly tripled in value amid the AI boom that followed ChatGPT and, through its listing, delivered unrealized gains. To the question of whether ¥3.3 trillion was dear or cheap, Son answered seven years after the acquisition with the phrase “a mere ¥3 trillion.” Buying ARM, alongside the forming of the Vision Fund the following year, was the starting point at which SoftBank remade itself into an investment company betting on AI.