The first days of the second Trump administration offered the newly elected president a chance to share the spotlight with some of his most important allies. While some of the featured leaders were ones you’d expect—cabinet nominees, congressional leaders, megadonor Elon Musk—at least one was a surprise: Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire tech investor.
The occasion for Son’s star turn in the White House Roosevelt Room on Jan. 21 was an announcement that SoftBank Group, Son’s Tokyo-based conglomerate, would put up most of the funding for Stargate, an ambitious partnership with OpenAI and Oracle that aims to turbocharge American leadership in artificial intelligence. Flanked by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and standing on a box to be seen above the lectern, Son promised Trump that Stargate would invest a staggering $500 billion to build a nationwide network of data centers, power plants, and research centers. Trump lavished praise on “my friend Masa” for bankrolling “the largest AI infrastructure by far in history.”
