How SoftBank’s Son Made It Back to the White House

When President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion plan for data centers to power artificial intelligence last Tuesday, one of the men standing to his left was already getting ready to write the checks.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son was already making plans to put a total of about $40 billion into the Stargate data center project as well as the company that is Stargate’s driving force, artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, two people familiar with the matter said. How SoftBank will finance the investment isn’t clear but the company had separately started discussions to borrow as much as $18.5 billion, using the value of its publicly listed assets as collateral, another person involved in the financing talks said.