Masayoshi Son, chairman of Japan's SoftBank Group, projected that the Humanoid Robot market powered by artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass 600 quadrillion won by 2040.
According to Kyodo News and NHK on the 14th, Son said in a lecture for affiliates held in Tokyo that the center of labor will shift from humans to robots within the next dozen or so years, and stated accordingly.
He forecast that about 1 billion Humanoid Robots equipped with AI will be in operation and the related market will reach 7,000 trillion yen (about 640 quadrillion won). That would be about one-fifth of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).
He also expected an "AI agent economy," in which 100 trillion AI agents communicate with each other and work nonstop, to take shape. To run this, he estimated that 800 trillion yen (about 740 quadrillion won) would need to be invested annually in AI infrastructure such as data centers, electricity, and semiconductors.
Son also expressed an intention to ramp up infrastructure investment, including power and data centers, needed for the spread of AI agents.
SoftBank has already entered the AI computing resource rental business in the United States. According to Bloomberg News, SoftBank Group and its telecom subsidiary SoftBank announced on the 2nd that they would establish a joint venture, "SB Neo," to provide AI Semiconductor and cloud services to large companies such as hyperscalers.
SB Neo will push a so-called "Neo Cloud" business specialized in graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure. The goal is to expand data center capacity needed for large-scale AI model training and inference to 10 gigawatts (GW) by 2030.
Miyakawa Junichi, SoftBank's chief executive, said, "We are reviewing sites across the United States as long as sufficient power can be secured and the location is suitable for data centers," adding that if the business succeeds, the target could exceed 10 GW.
People familiar with the matter said the telecom subsidiary's annual operating profit could jump three to four times to 3 trillion–4 trillion yen (about 2.83 trillion–3.77 trillion won) with this project.
With SoftBank Group set to invest a total of $65 billion in OpenAI by October, there is also speculation that OpenAI could become a major customer of SB Neo.