Masa Son isn’t discounting that there could be some overvaluation in AI stocks, but he seems more than bullish on the sector long term.
In a recent interview with CNBC, SoftBank chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son drew on history — including the dot-com crash and the Wall Street collapse of 1929 — to argue that AI is in the very early stages of what will be a generational growth cycle, one he believes will dwarf everything that came before it.
“I think this is more than 10x, probably 50x bigger than dot-com,” Son said. “Even dot-com, there was a bubble and burst, but then right after that, the peak of the dot-com bubble — the year 2000 — was not really a peak. It was like a small hill that went down, but then it went much, much bigger, with big, profitable free cash flow. So AI will be… this is a beginning, and the future of the profit and growth opportunity is tremendous.”
Asked directly whether he’s concerned about a correction, Son was characteristically blunt: “There’s always a correction. Even in 1929, there was a crash on Wall Street. That was basically because of electronics and motorization. Now, if you look at the history — electronics and motorization, 1929 — it crashed, but then went up and up for the next hundred years after that. So that kind of thing is going to happen. There may be some correction, but that would be the best investment opportunity time to me, if there is any correction.”
The interviewer then turned to the shape of SoftBank’s portfolio — pointing to Alibaba, the acquisition of Arm, and the firm’s investment in OpenAI — as evidence that SoftBank has become an AI platform playing across the full technology stack. When asked where the next trillion-dollar company would come from, Son’s answer was immediate: “Physical AI. Robotics.” And when pressed on whether he meant humanoid or industrial robotics, he didn’t pick sides: “Both — with AI, physical AI, as a core.”
The remarks reflect a worldview Son has been shaping publicly for some time. He’s argued that spending trillions on AI infrastructure is “very reasonable” given the potential returns, and has predicted that AGI will arrive sooner than most expect. His dot-com parallel is also personal — Son was worth $78 billion at the height of the bubble before losing nearly everything, only to convert a $30 million bet on Alibaba into over $130 billion over the following years. The man has some experience with riding out crashes.
What’s notable in his robotics call is that SoftBank has already started moving the pieces. The company acquired ABB’s robotics business for $5.4 billion in late 2025, framing physical AI as its “next frontier.” That acquisition, combined with SoftBank’s existing stake in Arm — whose chip architecture sits at the heart of most AI and robotics deployments — gives the firm an unusually broad position across the hardware and software stack. Son’s instinct, backed by capital, is clearly that the next wave of value creation won’t live in the cloud alone. It’ll have a body.