SoftBank has achieved an annual profit for the first time in four years since its strategic layout in the AI field

SoftBank Group Corp released its results on Tuesday (May 13), showing that its net profit for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, ending at the end of March this year, jumped 124% to 517.2 billion yen. Its full-year net profit also turned from loss to profit compared with the same period last year, reporting 1.15 trillion yen, marking the first annual profit in four years. This is mainly attributed to the strong demand for artificial intelligence, which has driven up the valuation of venture capital and the sales of the chip business.

According to Bloomberg, SoftBank's Vision Fund turned a significant profit from a loss in the same period last year, achieving a quarterly profit of 26.1 billion yen. Thanks to the artificial intelligence craze, Indian food delivery platform Swiggy, Electric scooter manufacturer Ola Electric Mobility and baby products retailer BrainBees Solutions, which were invested by the Vision Fund, have all gone public in the United States or locally, enhancing their valuation levels. Sales of Arm Holdings Plc, a chip design company under SoftBank, also rose due to increased investment in cloud AI computing. However, Arm still gave a relatively conservative forecast for the next quarter's sales performance, reflecting the rising market uncertainty.

Founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman launched the "Stargate" project in January this year, planning to invest 100 billion US dollars (about 130.4 billion Singapore dollars) in data centers and other AI infrastructure in the United States. And it is planned to gradually increase the investment scale to 500 billion US dollars. However, due to the impact of US trade protectionism and tariff policies, the debt financing environment has tightened, and SoftBank has not yet engaged in in-depth discussions on specific financing plans for large-scale data center construction.

Bloomberg analyzed that SoftBank has shown that its layout in the AI field has begun to bear fruit, and maintaining a stable cash flow and balance sheet will be the key to continuously raising funds at low cost and promoting the expansion of global AI hardware in the future.