On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump and Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank Group, announced $100 billion in the U.S. for the next four years to boost its economy.
Trump said that this investment, which will be focused on artificial intelligence and its related infrastructure, would help create 100,000 jobs. The investment is expected to be complete before the end of the Trump presidency.
In Trump’s previous term, Son made a similar pledge at Trump Tower in December 2016 to invest $50 billion to create 50,000 American jobs.
The new $100 billion pledge was made at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The investment would align with Trump’s plan to bolster the United States economy and reduce inflation in his second term.
The details of Softbank’s investment plan remain unclear. According to its most recent financial report, Softbank Group only had around $27 billion in cash left as of 30 September. The group’s Vision Fund 2 also has $3 billion of its funding left. Some sources familiar with the matter suggest that the capital may come from Arm Holdings, a British semiconductor company.
Furthermore, even if funding is not an issue, many still doubt the creation of said jobs. Softbank is in the process of rebuilding its finances after the failure of the WeWork office-sharing startup, and investors have abandoned the tech firm that Softbank has invested in through Vision Fund.
Trump is well known for his bombastic announcements of job creation, even if many such investments did not always yield results. Earlier in his first term, Trump announced a $10 billion investment by Foxconn in a Wisconsin plant, promising to create thousands of jobs, but the effort has since been largely abandoned.
