SoftBank turns to Gulf investors for its next AI fund

Masayoshi Son has held early talks with senior figures in the UAE and elsewhere in the Gulf about raising as much as $100 billion for new AI investments, according to the Financial Times. The proposed vehicle would go beyond buying stakes in technology start-ups: it could acquire established companies and use AI and robotics to make their operations more efficient. That is a much more hands-on version of SoftBank’s familiar strategy of placing very large technology bets. The discussions are preliminary, so neither the final size nor investor commitments are settled, but the outreach shows how central Gulf capital has become to financing the increasingly expensive race to build and deploy AI.