Softbank is ramping up its investments in the IoT

Global IoT Investment

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SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son offered a glimpse into his company’s broad investment strategy at a company event, reports Bloomberg.

The Japanese telecommunications and technology giant has started an investment fund that has provided funding for a variety of seemingly unrelated ventures, but according to Son, all of the moves have been steps toward ensuring that SoftBank has a role in every level of the increasingly connected world that's driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

Since announcing the SoftBank Vision Fund — the $100 billion investment fund to which SoftBank contributed $28 billion — the company has funded or acquired a number of seemingly disparate ventures.

Autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing: The fund made a $5 billion investment in Didi Chuxing, the largest ride-hailing service in China and an active player in autonomous-vehicle development. It also put $4 billion into graphics-chip designer Nvidia, which itself is betting heavily on autonomous vehicles, looking to add that as a pillar of its business. And it has invested in self-driving camera startup Nauto.
Robotics and AI: SoftBank purchased Boston Dynamics — best known for its dog-like quadrupedal robots — from Alphabet for an undisclosed sum, and led a $114 million round of funding in Brain Corp., which develops AI for robots.
Wireless connectivity: The company purchased control of US wireless carrier Sprint for $22 billion prior to the formation of the investment fund, and also invested $1 billion in satellite-internet startup OneWeb.

Through these and a number of other investments, SoftBank is looking to ensure that it has its hands in most aspects of developing technology. It already acquired ARM, the microchip designer that licenses designs for most phones, tablets, and connected devices, for $32 billion in 2016. SoftBank is establishing stakes in companies throughout the broad connected-device ecosystem, and at each level that supports and enables those devices to operate. Connected devices are a burgeoning market segment — BI Intelligence expects almost $5 trillion in IoT investment alone through 2021 — and SoftBank’s funding and acquisition moves will put it in position to take full advantage of the development of the IoT, robotics, and autonomous cars at multiple levels with various independent revenue streams.

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