President-elect Donald Trump and the head of the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, will announce a $100 billion investment effort designed to spur artificial intelligence and related infrastructure projects.
The effort, first reported by CNBC, will seek to create 100,000 jobs over four years.
Trump and Son announced a similar initiative in 2016 after Trump was elected president for the first time, with SoftBank agreeing to invest $50 billion in the U.S. with the aim to create 50,000 jobs. It is not clear whether that effort fully paid off, as many of SoftBank’s numerous startup investments in the U.S. and beyond failed to pay off. A report from Forbes in 2019 found hard data on the ultimate impact difficult to come by. Axios, however, reported it largely met the marks, at least for a time.
Today, SoftBank is a much smaller company than when Trump first took office nearly a decade ago — and according to Bloomberg News, it has only $25 billion in cash on hand, raising questions about how Son and his firm will come up with the pledge money.
A SoftBank representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Son joins the slew of tech titans announcing investments following Trump’s electoral victory. Amazon and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, this month each announced $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund, as have OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the AI startup Perplexity.