SoftBank unveils new AI-centric strategy

• Japanese operator SoftBank has been investing in AI infrastructure for a few years already
• Now it has unveiled its new five-year AI-centric strategy, ‘Activate AI for Society’
• It is aiming to generate a record operating profit in its fiscal year ending March 2031 by focusing on the ‘monetisation phase of AI’

Having already committed to AI infrastructure investments in recent years, Japanese telco SoftBank Corp. is now aiming to build on, and profit from, a new five-year strategy, dubbed ‘Activate AI for Society’, that it believes can help it to achieve record revenues and operating profits by 2031 through the “monetisation of AI”. 

The operator, which recently launched its own 5G ‘Natural AI Phone’ device, has just reported an 8% increase in revenues for its fiscal year that ended 31 March 2026 (financial year 2025) of almost 7.04tn yen ($44.8bn), a record high, and a 5% increase in full year operating profit to 1.04tn yen ($6.63bn). It also noted that it had achieved all of the goals set out for its medium-term management plan that ran from 2023 to March 2026. 

It added that over the past year, “the Japanese economy remained generally robust, despite impacts such as rising prices, labour shortages, and rising interest rates. On the other hand, the outlook remains uncertain against the backdrop of factors such as US tariff trends and increasing tensions in the Middle East. Under these business conditions, digitalisation has been progressing while the utilisation of AI has been expanding rapidly among companies and the government as they seek to address labour shortages and strengthen competitiveness. In particular, with the evolution and widespread adoption of AI, demand for data processing and electricity is expected to expand, and the infrastructure that supports these needs is growing increasingly important.”

With this in mind, SoftBank Corp. has unveiled a new plan, ‘Activate AI for Society’, which will run for five years up to March 2031. The new plan addresses the needs of the emerging new “business environment”, as the focus of AI is shifting from the training of large language models (LLMs) and initial investment in AI infrastructure to an era that expands and makes use of that infrastructure by focusing on the development and provision of AI-enabled services. 

At the same time, the operator is also focused on power management and ensuring that the electricity infrastructure is also in place to support the AI services era: It refers to this combination of AI and electricity infrastructure as “next-generation social infrastructure”.

“We will aim to activate the potential of AI across all businesses and drive its implementation in society… We anticipate that autonomous driving and robotics will become widespread as services within the next five years,” noted SoftBank in this announcement. “As we enter an era where inference is executed on a daily basis, the focus of AI will shift toward inference. By leveraging the next-generation social infrastructure we have proactively developed, we are transitioning to the social implementation and monetisation phase of AI,” it added. 

As part of its new plan, SoftBank Corp. is integrating its commercial AI computing infrastructure and AI datacentres into its Enterprise division, which currently generates about 14% of its total revenues, “to clarify our growth strategy” and to enable it to report specifically on the “cloud & AI” part of its operations. In the near term, it aims to “monetise Japan’s top-level AI computing infrastructure and the AI datacentres in Tomakomai City, Hokkaido Prefecture, and Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, providing GPU cloud and sovereign cloud services.” 

In addition, it will “leverage [its] enterprise customer base to accelerate monetisation through the deployment of AI services like Cristal Intelligence”, the advanced enterprise AI system it has been developing in partnership with OpenAI that is being designed to “securely integrate the systems and data of individual enterprises in a way that is customised specifically for each company”. 

SoftBank Corp. is also targeting the provision of sovereign cloud services to enterprise customers in 15 critical infrastructure sectors in Japan, and is building on the development of its homegrown LLM, Sarashina, to offer industry-specific AI models to businesses. 

And with the electricity generation part of the “next-generation social infrastructure” in mind, SoftBank Corp. also announced the launch of a Japan-based battery business “aimed at building next-generation power infrastructure to support the rapidly increasing demand for electricity being driven by AI adoption”. 

As a result of such initiatives, it expects its cloud & AI revenues to double in the next five years and help SoftBank Corp. achieve record revenues of 9tn yen ($57.3bn) and record operating profits of 1.7tn yen ($10.8bn) in its fiscal year 2030 that ends on 31 March 2031. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV