Buy now, figure out the specs later. That, in one line, was SoftBank's strategy for powering the biggest AI data center buildout on the planet.
And on Tuesday, it sent Masayoshi Son the invoice: SoftBank Group reported a net loss of ¥1.12 trillion ($7.1 billion) for the July-September quarter, its first loss in almost two years, when Wall Street was looking for a profit of ¥129 billion. The biggest single culprit was a ¥597 billion ($3.7 billion) loss on power generation equipment that the OpenAI backer had rushed to reserve for its US data centers, led by the 8 gigawatt campus in Pike County, Ohio... and then decided it didn't need after all, non-refundable deposits and all.
Regular readers know that we have been warning since last October that the AI buildout runs on debt, and that SoftBank, which has now sunk $64.6 billion into OpenAI, is the poster child for that thesis. Just one month ago we watched Masa pass the hat in the Gulf after maxing out junk bonds, margin loans and Japanese retail. Today's numbers show what all that borrowing has been paying for, and it is probably worse than even we expected.
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