孙正义对燃气轮机的大举押注适得其反Masayoshi Son’s Huge Bet on Electrical Turbines Backfires

Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son was so swept up by the artificial-intelligence frenzy in 2025, he placed reservations for a large chunk of the U.S. market for gas power plant turbines, grabbing hold of a key cog in the AI electricity machine. He overdid it.

Like an overeager miner who tries to corner the market for picks and shovels in a gold rush, Son’s SoftBank Group ordered so many turbines that even after fully supplying the world’s largest gas power plant, it was left with reservations for far more than it could possibly use.

The global tech investor switched course on Tuesday, reporting a $3.7 billion hit to its earnings due largely to canceled reservations on power generation equipment.

In all, SoftBank had reserved well in excess of 13 gigawatts of turbines, the equivalent of more than six Hoover Dams, according to people familiar with the orders.

The turbine trouble is, in a nutshell, the story of SoftBank amid an AI market frenzy that many fear is losing steam.

Son, SoftBank’s chief executive and an omnipresent figure in every tech boom and bust since the 1990s, has been one of the world’s most aggressive AI investors, at once pumping $65 billion into OpenAI while also launching a massive data center business and a robotics unit. The premise of his bet: The AI rocket ship would propel upward for years.

Now, the market fears the AI trade is overcooked. While use of the technology is still expanding rapidly, concerns are growing on Wall Street about the sector’s ability to pay off the mountains of debt funding the build-out. The AI infrastructure spending spree, when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, is projected to surpass the railroad boom of the late 1800s, itself a bubble that left a wreckage of painful losses.

Since June, when SoftBank briefly dethroned Toyota as Japan’s most valuable company, the company’s shares have fallen more than 55%, erasing over $160 billion in value. The market has grown wary as SoftBank has loaded up on debt, with the company agreeing to pay a heady interest rate of 9.75% on a recent slug of bonds. The cost of insuring SoftBank’s debt against default has surged.

At the same time, it faces growing needs for money: Its cash-hungry data center unit, SB Energy, delayed its planned public offering amid the choppy market.

SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto signaled a pullback in the company’s aggressive investment strategy on Tuesday. The company can’t be “all offense” in the current environment. “We need to balance between gas and brake,” he said.

Elon Musk, who runs rival AI and data center businesses, took aim at Son over his turbine splurge, alleging last week in a social-media post that SoftBank had defaulted on the orders.

Goto, while acknowledging the company took a hit related to the turbines, said there was no default. “This is simply not correct at all,” he said. “There is no such default.”Son was initially late to the AI party.

A Berkeley-educated entrepreneur whose star soared in the dot-com boom, Son has said he was briefly the world’s richest man before the tech bubble burst—sending SoftBank’s stock down 99%. He bounced back thanks to an early investment in Alibaba and a savvy purchase of Vodafone’s Japanese unit, and he raised the world’s largest venture capital fund in the 2010s.

Son was still licking wounds from misadventures in startup investing, most notably a series of disastrous bets on WeWork, when SoftBank missed out on being early into OpenAI and Anthropic. He had also made an early bet on Nvidia in 2017, only to sell out before the shares really took off.

But in early 2025, he dived headfirst into AI, investing $30 billion in OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation, while pivoting SoftBank’s chip company, Arm, more firmly into the business of data center chip design.

OpenAI’s value continued to surge as AI took off, as did the value of Arm, emboldening Son to pile more money into the company and the sector.

Son also plunged into new areas, particularly data centers, as SoftBank foresaw building massive server farms that would be used by OpenAI. He appeared at the White House with President Trump, promising $500 billion of investments.

That led to the scramble for turbines. Seeing that the rapid growth in data centers would require a historic surge of electricity production, between late 2025 and early 2026, SoftBank began placing reservations for the massive electricity generating machines, largely from GE Vernova, according to people familiar with the orders.

Turbines—the engines of gas plants that convert natural gas to electricity—require orders years in advance. Manufacturers have struggled to rapidly increase production as the demand for new power plants has surged.

Son told business partners that the effort was meant to give SoftBank control over a giant chunk of future turbine capacity—helping it leap into the data center race, according to a person familiar with the comments.

By early 2026, SoftBank had reserved the equivalent of more than the state of Connecticut’s power generation and a big chunk of global turbine production capacity. Market leader GE Vernova ships around 20 gigawatts of turbines a year. The orders involved a substantial, nonrefundable reservation fee. Turbine manufacturers typically charge tens of millions of dollars per gigawatt for a reservation.

While SoftBank at the time didn’t have any gas power plants under construction, the orders became valuable assets, given that the surge in turbine demand has caused yearslong wait lists for anyoneg up today.

The reservations strengthened SoftBank’s hand when it engaged in negotiations with the Trump administration to build a massive gas-fired power plant in Ohio tied to the larger Japan-U.S. trade agreement.

The final deal, announced in March, calls for the Japanese government to fund a $33 billion, 9.2-gigawatt gas plant on a former uranium enrichment site in southern Ohio. Construction is scheduled to start early next year, and the plant is to be owned by a joint venture of the U.S. and Japan.

SoftBank was named builder and operator of the plant, and it plans to use the electricity for a neighboring 8-gigawatt data center, which has been leased to OpenAI in what would be the world’s largest data center.

But even after supplying the plant and other smaller plants SoftBank plans, the company still had ordered too many turbines.

Its initial plan had been to use the turbines for future gas-powered plants, but in recent months, as additional payments for the turbine orders loomed, SoftBank made a change. The company opted to cancel its excess reservations, people familiar with the turbine deals said.

It also unwound contracts for some turbines that were further along in the order process, one of the people said.

A spokesperson for GE Vernova, the turbine supplier, said there was “no negative or positive impact” to the company from SoftBank’s moves.

In its earnings report Tuesday, SoftBank didn’t go into detail about the charges. It said the loss was tied to reservation fees and other modifications to contracts for power equipment. The orders had been placed “to secure power generation equipment in anticipation of shortages,” the company said.