SoftBank's Masayoshi Son Reportedly Considering up to $100 Billion Investment in France

According to Bloomberg, SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son has discussed the AI data center project in France with French President Macron, and the relevant plans may be announced as early as this month.

People familiar with the matter say that Son is considering investing tens of billions of dollars in France and has proposed an idea as high as $100 billion. However, the scope of the project is still changing, and if SoftBank prioritizes resources towards other plans, the final scale may be far less than this figure.

On the French side, Macron has always advocated for countries other than the US and China to build their own AI infrastructure and sees the French power grid and nuclear power supply as conditions to attract data center investments. If the project is implemented, it will become part of SoftBank's global AI infrastructure expansion and will put European sovereign AI, energy supply, and investment in computing power back on the same balance sheet.

The issue is that SoftBank already has multiple AI investment lines, including the data center project in Ohio disclosed in March, with a potential investment of $500 billion, and the Stargate project, which it cooperates with OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX in Abu Dhabi, also with a scale of $500 billion.

Bloomberg previously reported that SoftBank has downsized a $10 billion margin loan plan supported by its OpenAI holdings, and the target amount of the relevant loan has been mentioned to be as low as $6 billion.