SoftBank's Son dismisses AI bubble, projects $5T yearly by 2040

There is a certain confidence that comes with having already committed nearly sixty-five billion dollars to a single bet, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son deployed it in full at the company's annual Tokyo conference. According to Futurism's reporting, Son told the audience that 'asking if AI is a bubble is absurd' and added, 'I don't think people who ask that question know what AI is about.' He has previously called the same line of questioning 'blasphemy against AI.'

Behind the rhetoric is a math problem Son himself sketched. He put the required annual investment in AI at $5 trillion, or 800 trillion yen, by 2040, and argued that if AI revenue eventually makes up 20 percent of global GDP, then 'spending 800 trillion yen a year is a rounding error.' In the same remarks he quietly moved his own artificial superintelligence timeline from 2035 to 2040, a detail worth remembering the next time a headline figure appears.

Why any of this matters beyond one CEO speech: SoftBank's cumulative exposure to OpenAI reportedly sits near $65 billion, and S&P Global downgraded the group's outlook from neutral to negative in March 2026, warning that additional OpenAI investments would further reduce SoftBank's financial capacity. Son's confidence and his lenders' caution are now visibly at odds, and that gap is what the market is actually pricing. His posture also lands against polling that reportedly shows a majority of Americans already believe an AI bubble is real.

The honest caveat is that a single executive's projection of $5 trillion a year for the next decade and a half is not a load-bearing forecast, and the reporting does not settle where that capital would come from, how OpenAI reaches the revenue base that would make the 20 percent of GDP claim coherent, or what happens to SoftBank if the ramp arrives slower than Son needs it to. Take the specifics as reported, not settled.

For anyone building on top of the OpenAI stack, the useful signal here is not the theology but the commitment. The person writing the biggest checks is publicly locked in for another fifteen years, which raises the odds of continued capital flowing to OpenAI and its infrastructure suppliers, and lowers the odds of a sudden pull-back, at least from this financier.