Yes, that concludes the video explanation. Now, I will explain the details of today's agenda items. The details of each proposal are as stated in the notice of convocation posted on our website. The first proposal is regarding the appropriation of surplus. The second proposal is regarding a partial amendment to the Articles of Incorporation. The third proposal is regarding the election of directors.
Now, I would like to give a presentation on our business myself. Recently, AI is amazing. I myself use ChatGPT every day, probably 10 or 20 times, asking various questions, bouncing ideas, and using it for many things. On weekends, I probably talk with AI for about two hours. On weekdays, about one or two hours. I also discuss with employees every day, but the content of discussions often involves asking ChatGPT, 'What do you think about this?' and it gives very appropriate and deep responses. It's an incredible evolution. Until now, AI was about answering questions, consulting, or generating videos and images. But from now on, AI will take the form of AI agents, which we call agentic AI. AI will think and act on its own, without us having to give detailed instructions. If we share a goal, it will work towards that goal 24 hours a day without rest. It has evolved to that point. Furthermore, this will far surpass human intelligence. Superintelligence alone, if it only has superior brainpower, could run amok. But just as humans have reason, balance, and morality, recent models have started to incorporate such values into AI thinking. As a result, arbitrary rampages or intentional deceit by AI are gradually disappearing. Therefore, I call it not superintelligence but superwisdom. SoftBank Group wants to become the global platform for this superwisdom. In Japanese, platform means social infrastructure, or more simply, a foundation. We aim to become the social infrastructure that provides civilization for the ASI era. In today's presentation, I want to talk about three things. First, about ASI, which stands for Artificial Super Intelligence. I will share my vision on AI. Second, about the number 10 trillion yen, what that number means. Third, about how SoftBank will become the platform for ASI, and how we as a group will increase that. Those are the three topics.
Now, about 16 years ago, SoftBank had been in business for 30 years. About two weeks after founding, I spoke to two employees about SoftBank's 30-year vision. I spoke passionately for about 30 minutes, saying that eventually, like a tofu shop, we would have sales and profits in the trillions. But the next day, both of them quit. That was the first 30-year vision. Then, 16 years ago, I announced a new 30-year vision. Before that, at age 19, I set a 50-year plan for myself as an entrepreneur. I divided it into five stages: in my 20s, I would make a name; in my 30s, I would accumulate funds; and so on. Now I am 68. I had decided to pass the baton in my 60s, but at 68, I got greedy. I'm still energetic. When I thought about it 50 years ago, life expectancy was shorter, and I imagined I would be a frail old man in my 60s. But for health, I sometimes play table tennis with young employees. I play alone against three young employees who take turns, while I play continuously for an hour and a half. My table tennis is full of smashes, hitting hard. I'm a risk-taker, so I just hit. It's like a martial art. I jump around and go all out until I'm exhausted. But the three young ones can't keep up without rotating, and they are gasping. I get more energetic in the second half. So I thought, I'm still young. If I retired now, I'd be bored. So I decided to revise the 50-year plan and keep working for another 10 or 15 years in my 70s. Of course, that's assuming I stay healthy, and so far I'm extremely energetic. I travel abroad two or three times a month, and I'm doing very well. So in my 70s, as I said at the beginning, I will thoroughly pursue ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence, superwisdom. Since I'm the kind of person who can't be satisfied unless I'm number one, I want to be overwhelmingly number one in Japan, and at least in the areas we tackle in ASI, I aim to be number one in the world. I will do it.
I will do it. Humanity has been evolving for about 200,000 years. Compared to other animals, humans have the most superior intellectual abilities and intellectual labor. But the constraint on human evolution has been intelligence itself. We cannot become smarter than our intelligence allows. This intelligence and the ability to take action are what make us superior to other animals, but they also set the upper limit on human evolution. With the power of ASI, humans and AI will merge, and humans will maximize the use of AI. Because of this superwisdom, intelligence will be extended dramatically, and with physical AI, we will gain execution power, leading to the evolution of everything. As I said earlier, I announced the new 30-year vision 16 years ago. So my talk about AI, superwisdom, and robots is not something new. At age 19, I made a life plan, but two years earlier, at 17, I saw a photo of a microcomputer chip for the first time and imagined my life's path, and I cried. I thought humanity might have finally created something that surpasses human intelligence. That is now happening right before our eyes. This new 30-year vision has passed its halfway point, 16 years in. I want to look back. At that time, I said that brain-type computers would be born, computers that work and think like the human brain, not simple programs but self-thinking computers. That has come true. And when these brain-type computers are connected to robots, robots will have superwisdom. Robots will take over dangerous, hard, or boring jobs that humans used to do, and with AI-powered brains, they will evolve. So the new 30-year vision had two themes: one is this superwisdom AI, and the other is robots equipped with superwisdom, which we now call physical AI. First, about superwisdom AI.
As AI evolves, it will not just be an AI that answers questions, but an AI that works on its own. One person will be able to do the work of 1,000 people simultaneously. The calculations and tasks that white-collar workers do will become super white-collar. They will handle 1,000 people's work at once, deeper, faster, and more accurately. I myself file about 1,000 patents a year personally because I like thinking. Recently, when inventing or thinking of new things, I write design drawings. I ask ChatGPT, 'What do you think of this idea?' and we exchange detailed drawings many times. So it's not just calculation; it can think, imagine, create designs, and even create business plans together. At home, for your children or grandchildren, AI can provide one-on-one education with a teacher or ten specialized teachers tailored to each student. For engineers and researchers, various specialized superwisdom can assist. For each patient, whose condition differs daily, even if you want to ask a doctor, the doctor may be busy or lack expertise. In such cases, a superwisdom doctor can help with treatment or consultation. AI evolves, but it cannot replace humans. It should not replace humans. Humans connect with humans and wish for each other's happiness. But AI can evolve humans. It is a tool, a colleague, a partner for evolution. That's how I see AI.
The second main theme of the new 30-year vision is physical AI, which in our industry is AI robots equipped with superwisdom. Intelligence gains a body. They work autonomously 24 hours a day, doing various tasks. Robots will work together, communicating with each other, cooperating. They will handle dangerous tasks in space, disaster areas, underwater, or when human lives are at risk, doing rescues that humans cannot. On construction sites, there is a labor shortage, especially in Japan's aging society. Labor shortages are appearing everywhere. In farming, young people are not taking over. Super AI robots will help with all of that. AI is evolving at an incredible pace, and I'm so excited I have no time to sleep. But within this ASI evolution, what can SoftBank Group do? We have four main themes. First, AI intelligence models, the software part. We want the world's best AI intelligence model. Of course, we cannot do it alone, so we have our partner, the parent of ChatGPT, OpenAI, the pioneer of the AI boom over the past three years. We want to advance model evolution with OpenAI. Also, Arm has become our core company. Its CEO Rene is attending today as a director. Arm will play an increasingly important role. For AI evolution, the bottlenecks are not only chips but also electricity and data centers, the AI infrastructure. That is now a bottleneck, so we want to become the world's number one AI infrastructure provider. And with AI-powered robots, we aim to be the world's number one robot company. I will explain these four points. First, AI model: OpenAI. As a new intelligence, they have been evolving products over the past three years: conversation with ChatGPT, image generation, video, programming coding, and recently cybersecurity. They are still evolving at an incredible pace towards superwisdom. I often talk with their development leaders, like Mark Chen, and they are preparing exciting evolution programs.
Next, semiconductors. NVIDIA has become the world's largest company by market capitalization. Three years ago, almost no one knew the name. It surpassed Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. NVIDIA's strength is in generative AI, which generates conversations, images, and videos. It originally developed GPUs for graphics, and it is the world's best at that. In the first stage of AI evolution, NVIDIA's GPUs played a major role in conversations, images, and videos. That's why it became the world's largest market cap in three years. But now we have entered the second stage this year. In this second stage, rather than generating images and conversations, each AI agent thinks and takes action. One employee can have 1,000 actions, working 24 hours, thinking and working autonomously. This is the agentic AI stage. In agentic AI, CPUs play a more central role than GPUs for graphics. And the world's overwhelmingly number one CPU designer is Arm. We have listed it, but SoftBank Group still holds nearly 90% of its shares. So it's our company. It's your company, shareholders. This Arm, which you all own together, will play the world's number one chip role. In the first stage, Arm only made design blueprints and gave them to chip manufacturers. But for the first time, a few months ago, Arm announced that it will not only design but also manufacture the chip itself under the Arm brand and sell it as its own product. In the past few months, Arm's market cap and stock price have surged rapidly for two reasons: the coming era of CPU-centric AI, and Arm's evolution from a blueprint company to a chip company. Because of these two, Arm's market cap is now about 100 trillion yen? In Japan, it has surpassed Toyota, SoftBank, and others to become a huge presence. But I think Arm will still grow more than ten times. It's just the beginning.
Arm's chips and NVIDIA's chips are assembled in large quantities as servers and computer systems, and they work in data centers. These data centers are like factories for AI, with complex pipelines and high heat, requiring liquid cooling and intricate wiring. They need enormous amounts of electricity. So through SoftBank Energy, a subsidiary we own 90% of, we announced the construction of a 10 GW data center, equivalent to 10 nuclear power plants, at one site. That's about one-third of Japan's nuclear plants. I stood with the U.S. Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of Commerce, two cabinet members, to announce this as a joint project with the U.S. government. This will be the overwhelmingly largest data center in the world, and SoftBank Group will build it. In Europe, there is a power shortage, but France is the center of power in Europe. So with President Macron, on June 1st of this month, we announced the construction of a data center equivalent to 5 nuclear power plants. That will be the overwhelmingly largest data center in Europe. So we are doing AI infrastructure. That's the third point. The fourth is robots. How much preparation has SoftBank done for AI robots? We have quietly been collecting dozens of world-class specialized robot companies in various fields. When people think of SoftBank robots, they might know Pepper, which we made 10 years ago. Pepper is sometimes seen in stores. But we have been quietly preparing since then. We now have dozens of companies. We will use AI to rapidly evolve these specialized robot companies. Recently, we agreed to acquire ABB Robotics, the world's second-largest traditional robot company. We will bring it into SoftBank Group and aim to become the overwhelmingly number one AI robot company. So we have these dozens of AI robot companies and are steadily preparing for full-scale AI robots. We want to be the number one AI robot company. In the coming era of Artificial Super Intelligence, we want to be the overwhelmingly number one provider in these four areas. I'm good at Othello. In Othello, taking the center doesn't matter much. What matters is how you control the four corners in the mid-game, and then all the stones flip. In the coming era of superwisdom, we want to control the social infrastructure, the foundation of a new civilization. And if we do it, we want to be number one in the world. SoftBank Group has been active in Japan since its founding, but recently through Vision Funds, we have expanded to China, the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Now, with the evolution of generative AI into AI, the U.S. is gaining overwhelming power. We want to compete in the U.S., the home ground, and build a number one position. We aim big and want to be number one. Compared to last year's shareholders meeting, SoftBank's stock price has risen a bit. But many shareholders are probably half-believing, half-doubting. Today they believe, tomorrow they doubt, and they are often swayed by stock price movements. Especially SoftBank's stock price is volatile. Even experts say they can't understand the financial statements. I understand that feeling of half-belief, half-doubt. But I am different. I am 100% committed. I believe completely. However, the stock price is half-belief, half-doubt, moving up and down sharply. But please think. SoftBank is a strategic holding company. It holds many operating companies as subsidiaries. SoftBank Group itself does not operate businesses; it has specialized companies that do. We own 100% in some cases, 90% like Arm, 90% like SoftBank Energy, and the telecom company. SoftBank Group is a strategic holding company, also with an investment company aspect. The value of our holdings, especially Arm, is greater than SoftBank Group's own market cap. Our stake in Arm alone is 55 trillion yen at today's stock price. That's just Arm. Then we have OpenAI, SoftBank Mobile, Yahoo, Line, and many others. We also own ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Adding all that up, after deducting our net interest-bearing debt, which is only about 10% of our holdings, the net asset value is 74 trillion yen. That's twice our market cap. Most of our holdings are listed, so they have daily prices. So for every share of SoftBank you own at 6,500 yen, you actually hold 13,000 yen worth of assets after deducting debt. So half-belief, half-doubt is exactly this. You are only valuing half of what's in your wallet. But those here probably still hold because they believe. Be happy. You are actually richer than you think. There is a discount on your stock price.
But you might say that's not cash until you sell. Let's look back at our history. 16 years ago, I spoke about the new 30-year vision at this shareholders meeting. At that time, the value of our holdings was 5 trillion yen. Recently, I talked about the mother hen. If one golden egg is 1 trillion yen, let's count. 16 years ago, we had 5 trillion yen worth of holdings, five golden eggs. But we had 2 trillion yen in debt, so the net value for shareholders was 3 trillion yen, three eggs. The market cap of SoftBank was also 3 trillion yen. So the mother hen was valued at zero. Only the value of the golden eggs was considered SoftBank's value. Now, our net asset value is 74 trillion yen, but our market cap is only about half of that. So the mother hen is still undervalued. But I believe that as we execute our ASI strategy, the value will be recognized.
I was evaluated as having zero value. But please think. Over these 16 years, the golden eggs have increased. Three trillion yen became 74 trillion yen. The number of golden eggs increased from three to 74. Eggs don't lay eggs; the goose lays eggs. So who is responsible for the 71 that increased? The goose increased the eggs. The future value of the eggs is already reflected in the stock price. The goose's value was evaluated as zero 16 years ago, but now it has been proven. The goose's value was actually 71 eggs. History has proven it. At listing, it was 200 billion yen. Ten years before that, capital was 10 million yen. I started this company with just 10 million yen, no venture capital. It went public at 200 billion, then increased 15 times in 16 years. That means SoftBank, the goose, increased 15 times. Expressed as golden eggs, that became three. Then in the next 16 years, it increased another 25 times, a total of 400 times, to 74 eggs.
It's not that it just increased in the last 15 years. It increased before that too. How many years do I need to prove it? How many years must I keep increasing for you to say 'the goose worked hard'? You should not only count the eggs you see now. There are eggs in the goose's belly being prepared: robots, AI data centers. Eggs not yet debuted. Look at the goose itself. I want to say the goose has value. The ability to keep laying eggs. I have proven it for 40 years. Most of you here believe. But others not believing is an opportunity for you.
Looking back was good. But what about the future? You may feel uncertainty again. But the new 30-year vision is half done. In the next 16 years, if we repeat the pattern of 15 times and 25 times, I declare: 1000 trillion yen.
It takes courage to say this. If I miss, I'll be called a fraud. But I have one pride: SoftBank has never published next year's profit forecast. Most listed companies do. I don't because we are an investment company. But when I do give a number, I have never missed. Since founding, I have never fallen short of a medium-term plan I announced. That is my pride and stubbornness. If I say it, I will do it. So it took courage to say this today.
People call it a big lie. In Japanese, 'obora' sounds like a charlatan. In English, it's a 'big vision'. There is a vision, a dream. You describe it with numbers as if you've been to the future. That is vision. The Japanese economy's problem is the lack of big vision among executives. Matsushita, Honda, Morita talked about big vision. Now it's all salaryman executives. Founders have the confidence to speak. I want to speak. It is the captain.
The increase from 3 to 74 eggs was not eggs laying eggs. It was the goose. SoftBank Group was a golden egg manufacturing factory. The goose invests in companies with potential, nurtures them, makes them golden eggs, and takes them public. Why go public? So management can stand on stage, be evaluated, and work hard. We provide strategic support so they can help each other grow.
This is not a coincidence. There is know-how. We only do our specialized fields: information revolution, AI. We have 40 years of know-how. The value of the eggs is 74 trillion yen after debt. So the goose's value should be plus alpha. If the goose will increase eggs to 1000, its value is 900 eggs, or 900 trillion yen. From now on, call me Son Goose, not loss chairman.
I recognize my role. The value of our eggs is greater than our market cap. And the goose's value might be even greater. But you may worry that AI is a bubble. The internet was the same. But internet top companies grew tremendously. AI revolution has just started. Calling it a bubble insults AI. AI's power will explode. It's like three years after the internet began. If you could go back, you'd buy Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo at their early stages. AI is exactly three years in. It will grow fast. So I don't think my big statement is a bluff.
In this rapidly growing AI world, I will capture the number one position. No one in Japan talks about such a big dream. In America, some go after one corner, but not all four corners strategically. I will do it. So I have no time to retire.
Two and a half years ago, I lost my father. He had cancer that spread to his lungs, bones, liver. I visited him every day, crying and talking. On the day he died, two hours before, he was unconscious and groaning. Then he opened his eyes wide and said: 'A tiger leaves its skin when it dies; a person leaves their name.' Then he died. Those were his last words. I have been thinking about what he meant.
When I was five or six, my father would come home drunk and say to me: 'Masashi, we have to earn money to live. I earn money. But you, don't live a life for money. Live to make a million people happy.' He always said that crying. I talked about golden eggs and 1000 trillion yen, but I don't want to become a miser. My father would be angry. AI and robots are to make people happy. We develop technology for that. AI helps, not bullies. AI educates children. AI brings smiles. For that, SoftBank will work hard.
I will do my best. Thank you. I got carried away and went over time. Sorry.
