SoftBank Group buys DigitalBridge for $4bn to scale ASI data centers

SoftBank’s $4 billion move on DigitalBridge is less about financial engineering and more about owning the pipes and concrete behind future AGI‑class workloads. DigitalBridge controls and invests in data centers, fiber, towers and edge sites across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, exactly the assets you need if you believe, as Masayoshi Son does, that Artificial Superintelligence will require orders‑of‑magnitude more power, bandwidth and low‑latency interconnects than today’s LLMs.([group.softbank](https://group.softbank/news/press/20251229?utm_source=openai))

By vertically integrating from AI models down into physical infrastructure, SoftBank is trying to become a supplier of “AI industrial base” capacity, not just a financial backer of model companies. For the race to AGI, that matters: scarce high‑end data center real estate and power are emerging as binding constraints just as GPU supply begins to ease. If SoftBank can turn DigitalBridge’s 100‑plus billion dollars of managed digital assets into a preferential runway for its own AI ventures and partners, it effectively creates a private highway for training and serving more ambitious systems.([oanda.jp](https://www.oanda.jp/lab-education/market_news/kn_2025123001000351/?utm_source=openai)) It also pushes other conglomerates and sovereign funds to think harder about owning AI‑centric infrastructure, not just chips or equity stakes in labs.