SoftBank Plans To List New AI And Robotics Companies In The US

After years of investing in AI companies, Masayoshi Son wants to own the essential infrastructure they rely on. SoftBank Group is reportedly preparing to launch a new AI and robotics company, Roze, at a potential $100 billion valuation in the US through an IPO, as per Financial Times.

The Softbank-backed initiative – to clarify, this is an investment being made by the founder and CEO of SoftBank and some of its executives, which is looking to list in the second half of 2026 – has a more specific focus. The clue isn’t really in the name. What Roze will say is that autonomous robots can vehicles for removing the physical effort involved with constructing server farms. Neither are software companies or chip companies.

A wild guess is that the slowest in the exposition of AI will be not code or silicon but the physical building of datacenters to actually run all this stuff. Roze AI will probably try to make it more efficient, by, say, having autonomous robotics build data centers. Softbank has made a number of large investments in energy, land and infrastructure recently. They also agreed to buy ABB Robotics last year which could easily be combined with Ampere Computing’s server hardware and DigitalBridge’s software defined networking for the new venture.

You can not track the economic logic of an IPO easily. Years back, SoftBank has invested billions of dollars already in AI – including a $30 billion plus investment in OpenAI. The investors have been particularly keen on how those bets would be funded while the company keeps expanding its ambitions. A social-issue bucket would give SoftBank a pathway to raise external capital and take some of that pressure off.

Given that SoftBank has already secured a $10B loan, against its stake in the soon-to-be listed domestic telco business, demonstrates an intent to play in this space. Moreover, it recently liquidated its entire position in Nvidia – generating a cool $5.8bn – to help fund the Open AI investment. I understand preparatory work for a public listing is also well advanced.

KPMG has been engaged to prepare the necessary financials and documents for the public listing. To build excitement before the IPO, SoftBank is thinking about doing an analyst day in July at a data center in Texas. Ahead of its listing, Roze will have its interim CFO, Bilal Safeer – who’s currently an executive at Arm. The vision is real and so are the questions.

The report stated valuation target and schedule are subject to change, with some plans considered overly ambitious by some SoftBank executives, in part because of unknowns, given the war in the Middle East. An IPO for a company that hasn’t even commercialized a 100 billion dollar Roze products as a goal also puts in a very exclusive club. The only ones who did belong to this club and got listed have gargantuan revenues today, Saudi Aramco, Alibaba, Visa and Facebook.

In the past, SoftBank has often lost out on the big bets it placed. For his part, Son takes huge risks when making technology investments. In 2016, ARM Holdings was acquired by SoftBank at a cost of $32 billion and to this day the company still owns about 90 percent of it. It is now valued at 223 billion i.e. Softbank literally minted money from that bet.

The fact that many companies funded in the Vision Fund were many years at the balance sheet is highlighted in the age led to spectacular failures like WeWork, Katerra and Zume an AI-driven pizza delivery company that failed spectacularly after raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

The bearish investors got wiped out, with SoftBank’s shares climbing over 7% at one stage on Thursday as the filings gave buyers confidence that there is still a healthy interest in companies combining AI and robotics with vast amounts of data and compute.

SoftBank declined to comment for all of the stories. But it won’t have a chance to see if the market’s willing to value a robot-powered data center business at nine-figures until that analyst day in Texas next month.