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Masayoshi Son's AI ambitions are outgrowing SoftBank's balance sheet. This is a Financial Times report on SoftBank's acquisition of Digital Bridge and what the deal means for funding the AI boom. SoftBank, a conglomerate led by billionaire Masayoshi Son, has completed its $4 billion acquisition of Digital Bridge.
Digital Bridge is a digital infrastructure manager with over $100 billion in assets under management. The deal gives Son a new way to attract outside investors to its large-scale AI ambitions. The reason is scale. Son wants to build infrastructure projects too big to finance from his conglomerate's balance sheet alone .
Mark Ganzi, CEO of Digital Bridge, put it bluntly. “ As the zeros in Massa’s ambitions continue to grow ,” he said, “he won’t be able to do all of this solely on SoftBank’s balance sheet .” So, Digital Bridge will become what Ganzi calls SoftBank's infrastructure arm for working with third parties. It will raise funds from institutional investors to finance data centers, energy, and other projects.
This need for external money comes at an inconvenient time. The deal comes as Son faces new complications in financing his broad AI strategy. Three of them stand out . First, this month SoftBank launched one of the largest junk bond deals in history to fund its investment in OpenAI. Second, SB Energy, the SoftBank-controlled group responsible for building huge data centers for OpenAI, has slowed down preparations for its initial public offering.
And thirdly, OpenAI itself, the creator of ChatGPT, has postponed its own plans to go public. Against this backdrop, the completion of the Digital Bridge deal is seen as real progress in SoftBank's broader AI strategy. Ganzi described Son's goal using a metaphor. Son, he said, seeks to control three layers of the artificial intelligence “wedding cake .” The first layer is the large language models that SoftBank has access to through its stake in OpenAI.
The second layer is chips owned by SoftBank through its ownership of Arm. And the third layer is energy and data centers. This is the element that Digital Bridge now provides. Ganzi argues that this energy level is what everything else depends on. Energy, he says, is the gateway to computing. He clearly explained this logical chain.
If you can't control the electron, you can't reach the token. In other words, without energy there is no computing, and without computing there is no artificial intelligence. So what exactly did SoftBank buy? Digital Bridge funds have large stakes in several data center operators, including Vantage and Switch.
The third data center operator in the portfolio is DataBank. The funds also own a large stake in Zayo, one of the largest independent fiber optic networks in North America. The SoftBank takeover valued Digital Bridge at about $4 billion, including debt. Ganzi outlined how this arrangement should work in four parts.
First, Digital Bridge remains independent in the sense, he said, that we are not being consolidated into SoftBank. It will attract external capital and invest in projects. Second, SoftBank will become an anchor investor in future Digital Bridge funds. Ganzi compared it to Brookfield Corporation's role in Brookfield Asset Management.
This is the main idea, he said, to significantly speed up our fundraising. Third, Digital Bridge is going deeper into the energy sector. In May, the company agreed to acquire Arclight Capital Partners, an energy investor. Finally, the two companies will transfer the deals to each other. SoftBank will transfer infrastructure and energy capabilities to Digital Bridge, and Digital Bridge will redirect private equity-type deals in the other direction.
However, Ganzi drew a clear line. On the one hand, when SoftBank has good ideas and the returns are appropriate, he said, we are happy to participate and invest with them. Digital Bridge could help organize a co-investment syndication and raise capital for SoftBank's balance sheet. This, he added, is certainly a prospect for the future.
On the other hand, he warned that Digital Bridge deal-making would remain at arm's length. We have an independent pool of capital that we must invest, he said, and we take this responsibility very seriously. We will not invest money just in SoftBank's idea. This has to be a really good idea, whether it's SoftBank or not.
I really don't care . For Ganzi himself, this sale marked his third major exit in three decades. The first came in 2000, when he sold Apex Site Management to SpectraSite at the height of the telecommunications bubble. The second was in 2013, when he sold Global Tower Partners to American Tower for $4.8 billion.
After that, he took Colony Capital, a troubled real estate investor, and turned it into a $108 billion digital infrastructure manager in just 6 years. And here is the third way out—the sale of SoftBank, which raises an obvious question. Was this also timed to coincide with the market peak? Ganzi's answer was frank.
“This is the peak,” he said . "I think the peak has passed." “The days when data centers traded at 40 times EBITDA,” he said, “are over.” He went further, warning that about half of the data center leases signed this year will never be implemented. He cited three reasons: hostile local zoning, reluctant utility regulators and tighter funding.
However, Hanse separates hype from fundamentals. Inflated valuations and short-term problems with permits, in his opinion, are one thing. “The long-term value of these objects is a completely different matter. This value, he argues, is based on the “ extreme demand and future adoption of AI by industrial companies.” “If people think we’re late,” he said, “we’re not.” For Masayoshi Son, this bet is the main goal.
His ambitions have outgrown SoftBank's balance sheet, and Digital Bridge is a way to attract outside investors . This was a story about SoftBank's $4 billion deal with Digital Bridge and its aim to bring in outside capital to build Masayoshi Son's AI, based on reports from the Financial Times.
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