SoftBank billionaire quietly unveils project of staggering size | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has a long history of pitching grand visions.

“We only live once, so I want to think big,” he said, and his new idea definitely lives up to the billing.

The billionaire investor is pitching an idea to convert large swaths of U.S. federal land into a nationwide network of President Donald Trump-branded industrial parks.

Think of them as enormous sprawling hubs that are tailor-made to push out the hardware powering the AI boom.

It involves reimagining his trillion-dollar mega-city concept from early in the year, evolving into building massive facilities spread across various states, backed by a new Japan-U.S. investment pipeline worth hundreds of billions.

On paper, the parks could produce everything from fiber and servers to, eventually, advanced silicon that pushes the U.S. ahead in the fiercely competitive AI arms race.

Masayoshi Son’s newest pitch hints at a massive industrial vision taking shape behind the scenes.

Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images

Who is Masayoshi Son?

Tech visionary Masayoshi Son clearly isn’t the kind who plays it safe.

At 68, he still holds nearly a 30% stake in SoftBank (per Investopedia), giving him freedom to pursue ideas that would make even seasoned investors blink.

SoftBank, founded in 1981, covers a myriad of tech verticals like telecom, chips via Arm, e-commerce, fintech, and hundreds of startups.

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Through SoftBank, Son built his massive fortune (net worth in the $60-$70 billion range) on his powerful early bets in Yahoo and Alibaba, cementing his reputation through the Vision Fund.

That venture capital fund itself is a $93 billion swing at startup dominance, producing major wins such as Coupang and DoorDash.

Son’s latest giant swing in the AI arms race

The ambitious concept is essentially borne out of “Project Crystal Land,” Son’s earlier blueprint for a $1 trillion high-tech city outside Phoenix, Reuters reported.

It was meant to be a Shenzhen-style mega-hub bundling AI robotics, chip fabs, packaging plants, and even worker housing into one colossal footprint.

The new version pushes the idea even further.

Instead of just one big city, Son wants a distributed grid of Trump-branded industrial parks across multiple states.

Each of these parks could produce the hardware on which AI is dependent.

To pay for it, Son is looking to steer the plan into Japan’s new $550 billion U.S. investment framework, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Under the deal, Japan would front the capital, and the U.S. would get to keep nearly 90% of profits.

What’s at play behind Son’s industrial-park pitch

For Washington, Son’s pitch at a pertinent time, as the U.S. scrambles to rebuild its tech manufacturing base.

For Son, these facilities are essentially the physical backbone of his broader artificial superintelligence (ASI) vision, linked to Arm, OpenAI, and, as reported by CNBC, the $500 billion Stargate project.

Here’s what actually makes this proposal so incredibly consequential:

America’s push to onshore chips and data-center hardware, reducing reliance on East Asia while tightening control over its critical infrastructure.
SoftBank’s bid to own the AI hardware stack, covering everything from CPUs (Arm, Ampere) to hyperscale compute (Stargate) to OpenAI systems.
The massive execution risks range from federal-land permitting to environmental reviews and securing corporate anchors.

SoftBank is trying to own the AI stack

Son’s idea is that ASI could potentially become 10,000 times smarter than humans by the 2030s.

In fact, he calls ASI his “great dream,” saying everything SoftBank has done until now is just the warm-up. He even went on to say that he was put on planet Earth to realize ASI.

Though the talk’s extreme, Son’s basically reorganizing SoftBank around what seems like a three-part plan to build the entire ASI stack from the ground up.

Firstly, Son is writing the largest AI checks ever proposed.

SoftBank agreed to as much as $40 billion in follow-on funding for OpenAI, at a valuation of nearly $260 billion, with its own exposure at roughly $30 billion after syndication.

Secondly, he’s looking to develop the physical horsepower for that future.

SoftBank co-founded the much-talked-about Stargate LLC with OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX, as part of a plan to invest $500 billion in U.S. data centers by 2029, with $100 billion already in motion.

Thirdly, he’s tightening SoftBank’s grip on the chipmaking stack.

It owns 87% of Arm, having recently closed a major $6.5 billion acquisition of Ampere Computing, whose Arm-based processors target AI and cloud workloads.