SoftBank stock price surges over 11% in a single day! The market increasingly recognizes Masayoshi Son's "AI ambitions"

The Tonghuashun Finance APP reports that the stock price of SoftBank Group Corp., led by legendary investor Masayoshi Son, surged more than 11% after raising full-year profit forecasts for its telecommunications division. Its market value hovered around $173 billion, with Tuesday’s close up 10.68%. Recently, optimism surrounding SoftBank’s acquisition of Arm Holdings, a leader in chip design based on ARM architecture, has further strengthened investor sentiment that SoftBank may soon hold a core position in AI capital and holdings. Coupled with the optimistic outlook in the Japanese stock market for the Sanae Takashi-led government’s upcoming larger-scale stimulus policies to boost growth, this collectively drove SoftBank’s stock price sharply higher on Tuesday.

The latest drivers behind SoftBank’s significant stock price increase and the resulting strong expansion of market capitalization are highly conducive to advancing Masayoshi Son’s “AI ambitions” from vision to reality. This momentum is not accidental but built on SoftBank’s long-standing strategic foundation centered on AI computing infrastructure and core computing capabilities closely linked to data center CPUs. Notably, SoftBank’s current holdings in Arm Holdings, Graphcore, Ampere Computing, and its recent substantial investment in OpenAI reflect a comprehensive full-stack layout—from foundational AI hardware architecture to AI computing infrastructure clusters and AI application layers. As a result, SoftBank’s single-day stock surge of over 10% highlights increasing market recognition of Masayoshi Son’s “AI ambitions.”

Latest financial reports show that SoftBank’s telecom subsidiary, SoftBank Corp., exceeded expectations with an 8% year-over-year increase in revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2025, reaching a record 5.2 trillion yen. Meanwhile, operating profit also grew significantly by 8%, reaching 884 billion yen.

Driven by this robust growth, SoftBank’s telecom subsidiary has raised its full-year revenue forecast from 6.7 trillion yen to 6.95 trillion yen, and its operating profit target has been significantly increased to 1.02 trillion yen.

SoftBank Corp. stated that although it made slight adjustments to some consumer business segments to prioritize long-term profitability over subscription growth, its fiscal 2025 targets remain on track and exceeding expectations.

Revenue related to SoftBank’s consumer business grew modestly by 3%, with operating profit increasing by 6%. However, due to tightened customer acquisition policies, the number of smartphone subscriptions decreased by about 100,000 in the third quarter.

Andrew Jackson, a senior Japanese equity strategist at Ortus Advisors, said that the strong rebound in Arm Holdings’ stock price, in which SoftBank holds a large stake, has provided a new bullish catalyst for SoftBank’s stock. SoftBank owns nearly 90% of Arm Holdings, a UK-based chip design giant whose instruction set architecture is widely used across the consumer electronics industry and increasingly as the foundation for server CPUs.

It is understood that SoftBank is the major shareholder of Arm Holdings Plc., holding nearly 90% of its shares. Arm’s instruction set architecture technology is extensively used in consumer electronics and is growing as a core infrastructure for server CPUs.

SoftBank’s founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son, has stated that with SoftBank’s majority stake in Arm and its full acquisition of UK-based AI chip designer Graphcore Ltd., as well as recent acquisitions like Ampere, SoftBank aims to regain control of key technologies in the global AI computing infrastructure ecosystem.

Ampere and ARM’s Collaboration to Challenge x86 Dominance

Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, said during Wednesday’s earnings call, “Our royalty revenue related to data center use has increased over 100% year-over-year. We expect data center business to become our largest segment in the coming years, marking a major milestone—surpassing mobile chips for smartphones.”

Arm also plans to support more than half of the CPU cores for the world’s largest cloud providers—Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—by the end of the year, providing server-grade CPU architecture support for hyperscale cloud data centers.

Although Arm did not meet some of Wall Street’s highly optimistic expectations for licensing and royalty revenue, the strong demand driven by AI computing needs led to a record quarterly revenue of $1.242 billion in the last quarter of 2025, surpassing the analyst consensus compiled by LSEG.

The recent acquisition of Ampere, a company specializing in ARM-based server CPUs for cloud and data centers, not focused on consumer electronics or GPU clusters, signifies SoftBank’s control over the entire AI computing chain—from IP to actual implementation. This move further accelerates SoftBank’s goal of building the world’s most influential ARM-based server CPU ecosystem, actively advancing Masayoshi Son’s “AI ambitions.”

Ampere focuses on providing “Cloud Native Processors / Sustainable AI Compute” for cloud-native and large AI data centers, aiming for lower power consumption and higher rack density under equal computing power.

Its main product lines (for large server clusters/cloud computing) include: Ampere Altra—an 80-core server CPU based on Arm Neoverse; Ampere Altra Max—a 128-core version for hyperscale cloud data centers; and Ampere One—based on Ampere’s self-developed 5nm core, with future plans for 256 cores, supporting DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, further enhancing density and energy efficiency.

Arm is considered one of the biggest winners in the global AI boom. Nvidia’s Grace CPU is based on ARM architecture, Amazon’s self-developed Graviton server processors also use ARM, and Google’s first-generation ARM-based data center CPU, Axion Processors, built on ARM Neoverse, as well as Microsoft Azure’s Cobalt 100, are all examples of ARM’s expanding role in AI infrastructure. ARM architecture is evolving from the “king of smartphones” to a foundational technology for AI cloud infrastructure.

The reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture used by ARM enables server CPUs based on it to have significant advantages in energy efficiency and low power consumption when performing AI inference and training tasks compared to Intel’s x86 architecture. This makes ARM particularly suitable for data center servers, efficiently working alongside AI GPUs to meet the nearly limitless demands of AI inference and training. In the era of generative AI and intelligent agents, architectures like ARM Neoverse can deliver up to 3.5 times the workload per watt compared to traditional x86 processors in large cloud and data center workloads. As cloud giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft continue to invest heavily in AI data centers, a portion of these expenditures is expected to flow into fields closely related to ARM-based data center CPUs.

Accelerating Masayoshi Son’s “AI Ambitions”

For SoftBank, the continuous rise in stock price, strong profits from its telecom subsidiary, and recent acquisitions like Ampere are expected to significantly boost Masayoshi Son’s long-term growth expectations in “AI computing infrastructure and the global AI ecosystem.”

The 69-year-old founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, envisions a “super grand AI blueprint”—focusing on SoftBank’s role in global AI proliferation comparable to Nvidia’s—aiming to benefit from the massive investment returns driven by the worldwide AI boom. Central to this is SoftBank’s high stake (up to 90%) in ARM, the leading chip design company it recently acquired, along with Ampere, and its substantial investments in UK-based AI chip designer Graphcore, OpenAI, Oracle, and the $500 billion Stargate mega data center project in collaboration with Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, as well as long-term investments in AI leaders like OpenAI and TSMC.

The recent stock rally reflects the market’s bullish sentiment and strong confidence in SoftBank’s strategic layout in foundational AI infrastructure and core AI technologies. These long-term strategies form the core of Masayoshi Son’s “AI ambitions”—building a global AI technology investment ecosystem covering chip IP, CPU architecture, AI computing platforms, data center infrastructure, and leading AI applications.

SoftBank’s substantial investments in Arm Holdings, OpenAI, and Ampere demonstrate its comprehensive full-stack approach—from AI foundational technology to infrastructure clusters and AI applications. Arm, as one of the world’s largest instruction set architecture providers, plays a central role in mobile devices and increasingly in large-scale data center servers. Ampere, a rising star in ARM-based server CPU design, expands SoftBank’s control over the entire AI computing chain—from IP to implementation. SoftBank’s official AI strategy explicitly states that these investments are part of its “multi-layered AI strategy” (including ARM, Stargate, Ampere, and OpenAI), with the potential for these layers to mutually promote and generate synergistic growth, ultimately forming a vast “SoftBank AI ecosystem”—from low-level compute chips (Ampere + Arm + Graphcore) to upper-layer AI platforms and models (such as investments in TSMC and OpenAI).