Masayoshi Son Is Chasing $100 Billion for a New AI Fund

A decade after SoftBank rattled Silicon Valley with a $100 billion war chest, its founder is reportedly trying to pull off the same trick again — except this time he doesn't just want to fund companies, he wants to own them outright.

According to a Financial Times report picked up by multiple outlets this week, Masayoshi Son has been in talks with Gulf investors about raising as much as $100 billion for a new fund. Unlike SoftBank's old Vision Fund playbook of writing big minority-stake cheques into fast-growing startups, this vehicle would reportedly work more like a buyout fund: it would purchase full ownership of established, often underperforming companies, then try to turn them around using artificial intelligence and robotics, including technology from SoftBank's own robotics arm.

What's actually confirmed, and what isn't

Not much of this is locked in yet. No Gulf institution has publicly confirmed or denied interest, and the FT's own reporting notes there's no guarantee the talks lead to an actual deal. Son has reportedly been meeting senior figures in the UAE and elsewhere in the region in recent weeks, but a $100 billion commitment is the kind of number that takes months of negotiation to firm up, if it firms up at all.

A quick explainer for anyone who doesn't follow private equity jargon: a venture fund typically buys a slice of a young company and lets the founders keep running it. A buyout fund instead takes full control, replaces management where needed, and restructures operations to boost profitability before eventually selling or listing the company. What Son is reportedly proposing leans toward the second model, just with AI tools doing a lot of the restructuring work instead of traditional cost-cutting consultants.

The ghost of Vision Fund past

The scale here deliberately echoes 2017, when Son raised close to $100 billion for the original Vision Fund, with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala as anchor backers. That fund became legendary for swinging big and often missing — WeWork's collapse is the most cited example — while also piling money into Uber, Didi, and a wave of Indian unicorns. SoftBank is also currently carrying a reported $65 billion commitment to OpenAI, which has added to investor scrutiny of how stretched its balance sheet already is before any new fund gets announced.

Reaction has been predictably sharp. Elon Musk, replying to a post about the fundraising plan on X, didn't hold back:

"Only a fool would give them money."

Harsh, but it captures the skepticism following SoftBank around since the Vision Fund years — a reputation the new fund will have to actively work against to get Gulf money signed and wired.

Why this matters beyond Tokyo and Abu Dhabi

Indian founders and investors have more reason than most to pay attention here. SoftBank's original Vision Fund was one of the most influential — and controversial — investors in Indian tech, pouring money into Paytm, Ola, Oyo, Swiggy, Unacademy, and Delhivery during the 2017-2021 boom. Several of those bets struggled badly once they faced public markets or tighter capital conditions; Paytm's stock crash after its 2021 IPO is the textbook case. If Son's new fund actually launches and goes shopping for companies to acquire and "AI-ify," India's pool of post-boom, still-undervalued internet and logistics businesses is exactly the kind of territory it would plausibly look at next, just as a buyer this time instead of a minority investor.

There's a broader pattern here too. India's own startup funding has been trending the same direction in 2026 — fewer deals, but larger ones, with total funding touching roughly $10.3 billion across the first nine months of the year. Globally and locally, money is consolidating around bigger, more selective bets rather than being spread thin. A few things worth keeping in mind if this fund does start approaching Indian targets:

• A foreign buyout fund taking majority control of an Indian company still has to clear the Competition Commission of India (CCI), the regulator that checks whether a deal would hurt market competition — not a rubber stamp, especially in consumer-facing sectors.
• Full-ownership buyouts mean founders lose board control in a way minority VC rounds never required, which changes the calculus for Indian promoters weighing an exit.
• AI-driven "operational overhauls" usually start with headcount and process cuts before any AI tooling shows revenue upside — a pattern Indian employees in past SoftBank-linked companies have already lived through once.

Whether or not Son actually closes this fund, the shift in approach is the real story. Vision Fund made its name — and lost plenty of money — by betting on founders to grow into their valuations. A buyout-and-rebuild fund bets on SoftBank itself to run the turnaround. That's a fundamentally different skill than picking winners, and it's one the firm hasn't really had to prove at this scale before.