SoftBank Group and OpenAI announced a strengthened partnership on Monday, launching a 50-50 joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan. The two companies revealed their collaboration at an event in Tokyo, where SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke about the potential of their AI alliance and encouraged Japanese companies to get involved.
Son, holding a blue crystal ball as a symbolic gesture, introduced Cristal, an AI service designed to assist businesses with various tasks such as planning, marketing, email management, and deciphering old source codes. The service will first be implemented within SoftBank’s own companies, including Arm (a semiconductor and software company) and PayPay (a digital payment platform). SoftBank plans to invest $3 billion annually to integrate Cristal into its operations.
“This will be super-intelligence for the company. I’m so excited,” Son said during the Transforming Business through AI event, expressing his enthusiasm for the project.
Sam Altman discussed the newly introduced “deep research” feature, which enhances ChatGPT’s ability to perform more complex tasks. This includes the capability to prepare reports by quickly browsing the web and gathering information from thousands of sources, doing so much faster than a human could.
Sam Altman mentioned that the “deep research” feature will be available in Japan and will support the Japanese language. He emphasized that the partnership with SoftBank will help accelerate their mission to bring transformative AI to major global companies, starting with Japan.
Both SoftBank and OpenAI, alongside Oracle, are part of the Stargate project, which is backed by former President Donald Trump. This initiative aims to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. Son shared that Stargate will expand its reach to Japan and other countries.
Meanwhile, the technology industry has been disrupted by the recent announcement from the Chinese company DeepSeek, which has developed a highly intelligent yet affordable AI system.