Masayoshi Son, Chairman of Japan's SoftBank Group, of Korean descent, has sold all shares of the U.S. semiconductor company Nvidia, which he held, to secure a stake in the American artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI. The transaction amounts to $5.8 billion (approximately KRW 8.41 trillion). This move is part of an intense competition to gain dominance in the global AI industry, with a focus on securing funds.

SoftBank announced in its second-quarter (April-June) earnings report released on the 11th (local time) that "all 32 million shares of Nvidia were sold last month." The news of SoftBank's sale, coupled with the controversy over Nvidia's stock peak, led to a roughly 3% decline in Nvidia's stock price on the Nasdaq market that day. However, SoftBank clarified that "the sale was purely for funding OpenAI" and unrelated to Nvidia's corporate value.

With this sale, SoftBank is expected to secure an 11% stake in OpenAI. If the value of the unlisted company OpenAI is estimated at $500 billion (approximately KRW 725 trillion), the value of SoftBank's stake alone is expected to reach JPY 8 trillion (approximately KRW 76 trillion).

This sale is interpreted as being necessary for SoftBank to secure the funds required after committing to invest approximately $30 billion (approximately KRW 43.5 trillion) in OpenAI. Initially, OpenAI started as a non-profit organization, making listing and external investment impossible. However, after completing a reorganization to transition to a for-profit entity last month, competition for securing stakes in OpenAI has intensified in the industry. The Financial Times (FT) commented, "Investors believe they can access OpenAI through SoftBank, causing SoftBank's stock price to more than double this year."

Meanwhile, Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University and Vice President at Meta, known as an 'AI scholar,' also plans to leave Meta to establish a new AI startup, according to a report by FT on the 11th. Since 2013, Professor LeCun has been serving as the 'Chief AI Scientist' at Meta's subsidiary Facebook, formulating AI strategies.

His departure is interpreted as being due to conflicts with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Meta, seeing its AI technology lagging behind OpenAI and Google, is focusing on developing large language models (LLM) and accelerating product commercialization. In contrast, Professor LeCun is known to have focused more on AI development through video and image learning rather than language-based approaches, leading to significant differences in opinion.

However, FT also raised concerns from some quarters that the AI competition among major big tech companies is overheating. Google, Amazon, Microsoft (MS), and Meta have invested over $350 billion (approximately KRW 507.5 trillion) in data centers this year. They plan to invest over $400 billion (approximately KRW 580 trillion) next year.

FT pointed out that the rapid issuance of bonds by big tech companies to raise related funds is raising concerns about the financial stability of these companies. Recently, Meta, Google, and Oracle have all issued corporate bonds to raise funds for building data centers.

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