Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with SoftBank, newest first.
Asian markets opened Monday by repricing the weekend's safety warnings. SoftBank, OpenAI's largest outside backer, fell 10.7 percent in Tokyo, and the selling spread across the chip supply chain: SK Hynix and Kioxia each lost 6.4 percent, Samsung Electronics 4.1 percent, and South Korea's Kospi index closed down 3.3 percent. Dan Baker of Morningstar attributed the move to the possibility that regulators would slow AI development to avoid the outcomes Anthropic and OpenAI had themselves described.
Arm introduced the Mali G2-Ultra NX, which puts neural accelerators inside the graphics pipeline rather than beside it. Three techniques ship together: reconstructing high-resolution frames from cheaper renders, generating intermediate frames to reach 120 frames per second, and combining upscaling with denoising for ray tracing. Arm reports up to 24 percent higher benchmark performance than the prior generation and 14 percent on non-AI gaming. Tencent Games, Unity China and the studio behind Where Winds Meet are integrating it. No device timeline was given.
Draft offering documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show that SB Energy, the SoftBank-controlled power developer, granted OpenAI warrants valued at $3.6 billion when they were awarded in January — a position worth $5.5 billion by the end of June. What that bought was OpenAI as anchor tenant of the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, the site Nvidia agreed to backstop in mid-August. SB Energy is preparing an offering of $5 billion to $7 billion as soon as September, and reports a contracted backlog above $400 billion despite operating no finished data centers yet.
Nvidia is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer of the PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, and is providing credit support covering the land, power and buildings so the site can open at just over four gigawatts and scale to eight. SB Energy will own and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI, with Nvidia named the exclusive compute supplier. SB Energy and SoftBank say they will build at least 10 gigawatts of new generation and put at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with the utility AEP Ohio that is designed to protect ratepayers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion in financing so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt campus that SoftBank's energy arm is developing in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. The full project could cost more than $500 billion, and Nvidia is separately discussing another $350 billion tied to chip purchases. Investor Michael Burry, who is short Nvidia, called the structure circular — a chip vendor guaranteeing its own customer's spending on its own chips.
Hyundai is buying SoftBank's remaining 9.65 percent stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, making the Massachusetts robotics maker a wholly owned subsidiary. SoftBank — which bought Boston Dynamics from Google in 2017 — is exiting to free up capital for its much larger bet on OpenAI. Hyundai, meanwhile, is doubling down: a production version of the electric Atlas humanoid is slated to start work at its Georgia EV plant by 2028.