President-elect Donald Trump and SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son revealed on Monday at Mar-a-Lago that the company plans to invest $100 billion in U.S. projects over the next four years, aiming to create 100,000 new jobs. This new commitment follows a similar announcement from December 2016, where Son pledged a $50 billion investment and the creation of 50,000 jobs. Through its venture capital division, the Vision Fund, SoftBank ended up investing about $75 billion. The exact number of jobs created has been harder to determine, especially with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on employment.
This year’s investment will primarily focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and related infrastructure, such as energy, data centers, and semiconductor chips, according to sources familiar with the plans.
New U.S. presidents and presidents-elect have often made joint announcements with companies about significant investments aimed at revitalizing American industry. However, the success of these ventures has been mixed.
SoftBank, for example, never fully clarified how many of the jobs promised in its 2016 announcement were actually created, or how many resulted from new investments. As part of the plan, SoftBank said it would invest $1 billion into the Florida startup OneWeb. However, the company later explained that it had been in talks with OneWeb long before the announcement, according to SoftBank spokesperson Matthew Nicholson.
One of the most well-known examples involves President Trump’s 2017 announcement with Foxconn about a $10 billion electronics factory in Wisconsin, expected to create 13,000 jobs. However, Foxconn eventually scaled back its plans, and by 2021, the company revised the deal to invest only $672 million, creating fewer than 1,500 jobs.
Despite this, Foxconn claimed to have invested $1 billion in the state and still operates a major manufacturing site for data servers, employing over 1,000 people. The original factory plans have since been repurposed into a Microsoft data hub focused on training employees and manufacturers in artificial intelligence.
