Softbank's $100B Pledge
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From the heart of where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond, this is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. ♪♪

Live from New York, this is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son set to announce plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S. during a visit with President-elect Donald Trump. We bring you the news. Plus, Bitcoin rises to a record high amid MicroStrategy's inclusion in the Nasdaq. And Apple's got plans for a new foldable iPad and aims to bring it to market by 2028.

But first, we check in on these markets, which have a risk-on attitude to the day, as we anticipate key Fed decision come Wednesday. Ahead of that, NASDAQ 100, yet a new record high. We're up nine-tenths of a percent. Chipmakers managing to drive higher. Micron, Broadcom. But also, we're seeing Bitcoin up 3.4 percent. We are once again escalating to new levels. We dig into the reasons why, but of course, Trump being one of them, the

focus on the new administration, but also MicroStrategy likely to be added to the NASDAQ and what that means for its own purchases of Bitcoin. We're up at $106,000 per token. But the big breaking news of the day when it comes to technology is, of course, according to the people familiar that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is set to announce plans to invest a whopping $100 billion in the United States over the next four years.

It's all according to sources, as we say. And this is as he's planning to be meeting with President-elect Trump today in Mar-a-Lago. We're expecting Donald Trump to speak in a few moments' time. For more, let's bring in Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom. And for, well, back in 2016, we saw big promises made by Massa, and this time he's doubling them.

Yeah, you'd be forgiven if you thought this was deja vu. It was eight years ago, in fact, eight years ago, December, when Masayoshi Son went and met with Trump and he talked about investing $50 billion. Now he's doubling that pledge. It's $100 billion that he's planning to invest, according to our sources, and also he's planning on creating an estimated $100,000.

jobs in the United States. So this is the first major investment that we've seen after Trump's win. It's certainly a pledge towards what Trump has been trying to do in terms of reinvigorating the economy. For SoftBank, it's also a pretty big push into the United States. Last time when they pledged $50 billion, Masa had just raised this vision fund. He had plenty of capital. He put investments into companies like

WeWork and DoorDash and plenty of others. But right now, he doesn't have that kind of cash anymore. He only has about $25 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and yet he's doubling that pledge. So he has some work to do here. Has some work. We're also wanting to know the finer details of where exactly he allocates. He's been all

in on AI, saw this curve coming before many others, of course, as evidenced by his arm holdings acquisition and then taking that to market. But where else do you think he'll be investing in the United States?

Yeah, well, more recently, including at SoftBank World this summer, he's talked a lot about artificial intelligence and how he wants to invest even more in more kinds of companies. So he is putting money into OpenAI in particular, the pioneer, of course, behind ChatGPT. He's put in $500 million so far, and he's right in the process of a tender offer now where he's offering OpenAI services

investors the ability to sell him their shares so he can get another $1.5 billion. But his ambitions go far beyond that. He's talked about the need to have more alternatives to NVIDIA chips in particular. He knows that energy is a huge issue for AI right now, so he wants to make investments there. He's also been investing quite a bit in autonomous driving. So he has a lot of ambitions. He always has a long list of deals and investments that he wants to make. So we're going to see where exactly he puts that money. But it is a lot of money right

now and again. He doesn't have that cash on his balance sheet. He has to be able to go out and get that from someplace. Peter Alstrom, we thank you so much for bringing us up to speed on the anticipated announcement. Now, let's keep discussing trends in tech markets more broadly, what this influx of money into AI really means for the U.S., at least. Denise Chisholm is with us, Director of Quantitative Market Strategy over at Fidelity. We love having you on because of the historical context you can put today's investment advice.

But I mean, we look at what's happening in the market. When you're thinking of a juggernaut of $100 billion coming into US AI and energy, well, it feels like a lot of money has already gone that direction.

Yeah, well, when you rebase it relative to sales or relative to market cap, I mean, you haven't really seen that much of a move. I think we talk about this all the time with money funds sitting on the sidelines, how much cash is on the sidelines or how much cash in terms of nominal CapEx. But when you actually renormalize it, given the move that we've seen in the marketplace over the last five years, it's a much lower percentage than you would think.

Interestingly enough, specifically for tech stocks, and I would say more specifically for software stocks, CapEx is very much an alpha factor, meaning that that spending is usually a good thing for stocks because it's very correlated to earnings growth.

Okay, so I'm not going to ask you to opine as to where exactly Masayoshi Son is going to be putting his investment. But if you're looking at an everyday, whether it's retail or institutional investor right now, allocating to opportunities, do you have to be put off by some of the valuations right now? Or actually, do you keep chasing the momentum, keep chasing the names that have done well?

Well, it's interesting. So technology has had a little bit of underperformance over the course of the last six months. And because earnings growth in free cash flow has been so strong, you're actually out of anomalous valuation situation. So I define anomalous valuation as top quartile. So we have fallen out of top quartile levels, which is where you see the risk reward become fairly negative for tech. Now,

Well, as we enter 2025, coming out of that top quartile valuation zone, I actually think it sets up for a pretty positive risk reward. And for all the talk about momentum stocks on our data, when you look at it specifically within technology, I'm not seeing any anomalous behavior. Meaning I'm not seeing top quartile relative performance over the last year, and I'm not seeing top quartile valuation on that top quartile of momentum.

that because earnings and free cash flow are so strong, there's no valuation situation where you're saying you're overpaying on a consistent basis for technology stocks that have been leaders in the S&P 500. Wow. So it still feels like there's basically opportunities in the MAG7. What about the next tier down? We started to see software names really come to the rise as people started to reallocate perhaps from the semiconductor trade out to the killer applications being borne out. Is that something that you'd like to see more of?

No, that's a great question and a great point because of the three big areas within technology, if you say hardware, software, or semis, where are the opportunities? It looks very interesting on the data in software to me. Given the strength in free cash flow and earnings valuations, you're actually in the bottom half of the distribution from a valuation perspective when you look at all the data back to 1962. And what you see is that very much empirically skews your risk-rewards odds.

odds for the software sector specifically. So when you have strong growth and valuation support, it's a very positive risk reward for the sector. Of those three, hardware, software, and semis, software is the only one of those three industries that looks like that. So I think as we enter 2025, that's where it looks like the opportunities are to make. And in the U.S., Denise?

Yes, in the U.S. What of the U.S. exceptionalism and this trade that we all keep talking about? I mean, is it going to dominate for 2025?

To me, it does look like that. So everything outside the U.S., whether you want to talk about IFA, EM, or ACWI, X the U.S., what you'll find is that valuation screen looks like a quantitative value trap to me, meaning that when you bought in that bottom quartile relative valuation on earnings or free cash flow, you only have 30% odds of outperformance. Like 30% is not zero.

But at the same time, it's hard to say that that valuation is a critical driver. And the reason why it's not a driver is because often international stocks are cheap for a reason. Even on a sector-neutral basis, taking out technology, median stock to median stock, the S&P 500 outgrows their international peers by about 300 to 400 basis points a year on earnings, and it's growing every cycle.

So unless you think something is going to change that hasn't been the case over the last 15 years, I think the risk-reward is still more favorable in the U.S. This is why your historical context is so important. Denise, I go, therefore, to the macro picture. We are, of course, seeing the micro news on an investment coming from NASA, but we're also seeing the macro news of we're waiting on rates to go down. What does that mean for that cash on the sidelines that still perhaps is waiting to enter?

Yeah, so rates, let's talk about rates being an alpha factor for the market. I think people get a little confused in terms of thinking about whether or not the playbook is a good thing or a bad thing. Rates are not the critical driver. Earnings growth is the critical driver. So when you look at

the Fed from a playbook perspective. Sometimes the Fed's cutting because they have to. That's not good for the market. Sometimes the Fed's cutting because they can. And what you see from a quantitative differential from those like trying to divide those two is your starting point on earnings growth matters a lot. Our starting point of positive earnings growth usually predicts a more bullish situation for the S&P 500. Your starting level of the Federal Reserve matters a lot as well, because that's essentially a mathematical definition of the Fed put.

Meaning if the Fed is high relative to inflation, they can do something to the extent that the economy is hit with a shock. That's a good thing. That's our situation as we enter 2024. And most importantly, the Fed can definitively change willingness to lend of banks. Because that's been in contractionary territory and because that's likely improving, earnings growth is likely to broaden out in 2025.

include those small businesses that have been lagging, and that skews your risk-reward being pretty positive as we enter 2025. But then how risk-hungry do the edges of the market become? I mean, we look at a day where MicroStrategy, which has basically been a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, hugely outperforming Bitcoin in and of itself, is now going to be added to the Nasdaq. I mean, are we going to see more money flow to those sorts of riskier edges?

No, that's a great question. So, I mean, without talking about the idiosyncratic names, when I look at quality, which is sort of the opposite of the fact that you're talking about, it's been a darling of a factor, much like Loval was, only underperforming, I think, three in the last 20 years. Well, that's left quality stocks fairly expensive.

And that doesn't necessarily mean those high quality stocks need to underperform by a lot, but to the extent relative earnings or those relative returns start to inflect lower, that usually does lead to underperformance in the factor. So for anybody with a quality bias, I'd think about scrubbing your portfolio and thinking about better risk rewards in what have been historically riskier names.

Denise, unbeatable. Thanks for coming on. Denise Chisholm, Happy Holidays, Director of Quantitative Market Strategy at Fidelity. Coming up, we're going to focus a bit more on Bitcoin and microstrategy. Of course, crypto, Bitcoin itself had a new record high throughout the weekend and now longest weekly winning run since 2021. We'll dig in. Also...

We're going to be focusing on later in the show a bit more about Vivendi, but look at it. Don't look at Vivendi's stock today because it's currently distributing itself up and is breaking itself into three different companies. But what I want you to focus on is what CVC is up to at the moment, exploring a potential purchase of Vivendi's Telecom Italia stake. This is, as we know, that Vincent Bellore, the billionaire in charge of Vivendi, is trying to make his assets work for him. This is Bloomberg Technology.

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Bloomberg Invest returns on March 4th and 5th. This is Shanali Basick. Join me and many of the most important institutional investors and money managers for New York's top finance event. Come face to face with the leading voices in markets. Identify the next big investments, forge meaningful connections, and swap strategies. Register now at BloombergLive.com slash invest. That's BloombergLive.com slash invest.

And we are expecting President-elect Trump to speak live from Mar-a-Lago in a few moments' time. All eyes on that reported $100 billion investment coming from Masayoshi Son into the United States and 100,000 jobs to be created too. We'll bring you that as and when it occurs. But for now, let's just focus on another area that Trump has helped rally, and that is Bitcoin, rising to a record high, in large part because of

the next administration's supported digital assets, but also there's this optimism about the upcoming inclusion of micro-strategy in the NASDAQ 100 and what that means for future purposes and purchases. Isabel Lee is here with more.

Look, MSTR gets into Nasdaq 100, it means technically that more funds will have to allocate to it, right? It really is a big deal. It represents kind of like this institutional acceptance of Bitcoin, which is interesting because MicroStrategy and its co-founder Michael Saylor has long been ridiculed by Wall Street, especially since they started purchasing Bitcoin in 2020. And today, again, for the sixth straight Monday, they bought $1.5 billion worth. Their total cashier is $45 billion.

So it's really that. The stock has rallied 500%. But you're right, around $451 billion worth of ETFs track the NASDAQ 100. So they will all have to rebalance. Isabel Lee, we thank you. We'll have to cut it short there because we do understand that President-elect Donald Trump is now starting his press conference in Mar-a-Lago. Listen in. We'll discuss a couple of points. We'll take some questions later if you'd like. I'm sure you might have one or two. I'd be shocked if you didn't. I'd be very impressed.

But I'm honored to welcome one of the most accomplished business leaders of our time, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, everybody knows, Masa Yoshisan. Masa runs one of the largest companies in Japan and among the most successful investment and technology companies anywhere in the world, one of the most successful investors in the world. And we've just concluded a very productive meeting. And today, I am thrilled to announce that SoftBank will be investing

$100 billion in America, creating 100,000 American jobs at a minimum. And he's doing this because he feels very optimistic about our country since the election. And many other people are also coming in with tremendous amounts of money. You probably noticed that the poll was just taken. It's businesses

Literally, in 39 years, there's been nothing like it. It's been the biggest increase. Small business owners gave it a 41 percent jump. It's the biggest jump that we've had in 39 years. And nobody has ever seen anything like it. And it's just -- they're very optimistic.

This historic investment is a monumental demonstration of confidence in America's future, and it will help ensure that artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and other industries of tomorrow are built, created, and grown right here in the USA. One of the beautiful things about Massa is he's very much involved with emerging technology. He probably knows it maybe better than almost anybody.

So it's a great honor. And some of you remember after the 2016 election, also SoftBank committed to invest $50 billion in our country, and they did.

and a very place to say that they kept that promise in every way, shape, and form. And now they're looking to do 100. And I've looked at their books. They do have the possibility of doing more. I'm going to ask them to do a little bit more. But first, I'm going to ask him to speak. And just to say a few words. Masa, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Hamid. Thank you so much. I'm very, very excited.

I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump. And my confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory. So because of that, I'm now excited to commit this $100 billion and 100,000 jobs into the United States.

This is double of last time, as President Trump said. Because I say, oh, President Trump is a double-down president. I'm going to have to double down, you know? $100 billion and 100,000 jobs. This is, you know, my confidence level, because that has doubled down. So I am truly excited.

to make this happen. And of course, business is important, technology is important, but one more thing I'm really hoping is that this President Trump would make the world, bring the world into peace again. That's my additional hope. And I think he will actually make it happen.

So anyway, I'm excited to go and we were discussing and President Trump said, "Masa, you know, double down is not enough. Maybe, you know, go for more." Right? That's what I'm going to ask him right now. Would you make it $200 million on Saturday? He can actually -- believe it or not, he can actually afford to do that. Would you do that?

My promise is hundred, but he's now asking to do more. I think with your leadership, my partnership with you, with your support, I will try to make it happen.

The President: All right, 200. He'll make it happen. Two hundred million investment. Mr. He is a great negotiator. The President: He's a brilliant guy and an unbelievable job. And the people of Japan and all over the world are very proud. Tremendous respect for him. So, what he does, what he just did, and I would be surprised if it -- what didn't go to two. And when you say you'll try,

I will really try. And I need your support, though. You have my support. All right. We have a lot of support. Oh, fantastic. Thank you, Master. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm sure our people in Japan are proud to make the partnership of U.S. and Japan be stronger.

And I'm very excited to make this happen. Thank you very much. The President: Thank you, Marcel. Marcel Ophuls: Thank you. Thank you. The President: That's a great gentleman. Marcel Ophuls: Thank you. The President: That's amazing. That's a great gentleman, a great leader, and a great investor.

So to have that offer made -- and we have so many companies coming in now that will be announcing, or that will announce themselves. We don't have to be with them to do it. But they'll be announcing. And as I said, small business optimism took a 41-point jump. Forty-one points. It went up 41 points. That's unheard of. And that's the biggest, they think, in recorded history, but they know at least a minimum of 39 years. So that's great.

On behalf of the American people, I want to thank Massa for his faith in what's happening with our country and what's happening with the world. There's a whole light over the entire world. Many people -- some reporters in speaking room, they said, you know, it actually is true. A couple of them are not necessarily friends of mine, but they said it is actually true that there's a light shining over the world. We're trying to help very strongly in getting the hostages back, as you know, with Israel and the Middle East.

We're working very much on that. We're trying to get the war stopped, that horrible, horrible war that's going on in Ukraine with Russia, Ukraine. We're going to -- we've got a little progress. It's a tough one. It's a nasty one. It's nasty. People are being killed at levels that nobody has ever seen. You know, it's very level fields. And the only thing that stops a bullet is a body, a human body.

And the number of soldiers that are being killed on both sides is astronomical. I've never seen anything like it. And rapidly, I get reports every week, and it's not even, you know, it's like just going down. Nobody's seen anything like it. It's a very flat surface, a very flat land. That's why it's great farming land. It's the breadbasket for the world, actually.

but it's very flat and there's nothing to stop a bullet but a body. There's no protection, no nothing. And it's what's happening there is far worse than people are reporting for both sides. So we're going to do our best that we've been doing our best and we'll see what happens. But since the election, I've been working every day to put

the world at ease a little bit to get rid of the wars. We had no wars when I left office, and now it's -- the whole world is blowing up. But there's great optimism, and you saw that by SoftBank. Starting on day one, we'll implement a rapid series of bold reforms to restore our nation to full prosperity. We're going to go full prosperity and to build the greatest economy the world has ever seen, just as we had

just a short time ago. We had it in my term. We had the greatest economy that the world had seen. We were blowing away everybody. Our country was doubling up on China, doubling up on everybody, and everybody knows it. And then we had to slow it down with COVID, unfortunately, at the end. But even then, I gave it back with a substantial increase of the stock market, bigger than it was pre-COVID. So it was pretty amazing.

Already, preparations are underway to slash massive numbers of job-killing regulations, eliminating 10 old regulations for every new one. You put a new regulation on, you have to get rid of 10, and we'll be able to do it. And that was about the percentage we had. We cut more regulations than any President has ever cut by far, actually, by approximately five times.

Some of those regulations, unfortunately, were put back on, but we'll catch up very quickly. We'll catch up with it. One of the things I'd like to ask the Biden administration, as you probably heard, there are two events that took place. We're talking about a...

friendly takeover, a friendly transition, as they like to say. This is a friendly transition, and it is. But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible. One is that if people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed.

Somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that so that for five years, people don't have to come back into the office. It involved 49,000 people. For five years, they don't have to go. They just signed this thing. It's ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union. And we're going to obviously be in court to stop it. The other thing is,

really terrible. We spent a tremendous amount of money on building the wall. The wall was designed specifically by the Border Patrol because it's very hard to climb. They need to have see-through. They need it to be steel because you can't cut. It's very powerful steel. It's very hard steel. It's a special type of steel, but very, very hard to cut. Inside the steel, as you know, we pour concrete, and that's a grade 10 concrete, which is a very strong concrete, very

as though you were building about a 60-story building. It's very powerful concrete. They've made tremendous technology advances in the word "concrete." Who would think that? But I know that from the construction industry. Today, what you can do with concrete is incredible. So we have a very strong concrete. And then we have a rebar. We put rebar inside the concrete.

And the rebar, likewise, is very hard to cut. So it's a very expensive process, very expensive wall. And then we put an anti-climb plate on the top. You saw that. And I didn't like the look of it. But then when I watched, we had people testing. We had mountain climbers actually testing. And they were not able to get over the anti-climb plate. So I said, all right, I guess we're going to put it on. That plate on top, which I

I never loved the look of it, but it works so unbelievably well, you have to do it. So we spent a lot of money on building it, and we have hundreds of miles that we put up. A lot of people don't realize, but we did 571 miles of wall. That's why we had such good records, in addition to the fact that Mexico helped us with their military. They kept people out, and they were actually very good under the past leader.

But now we had -- we ordered an additional 200 miles of wall. It's very expensive. And now it's about double the price of what it would have been six years ago. And the administration is trying to sell it for 5 cents on the dollar, knowing that we're getting ready to put it up. And what they're doing is really an act -- it's almost -- it's almost a criminal act. They know we're going to use it. And if we don't have it, we're going to have to rebuild it.

And it'll cost double what it cost years ago, and that's hundreds of millions of dollars, because you're talking about a lot of wall. I built much more than I said I was going to build. But then after it was built, I said, you know, we can do some more because it's sort of like water. People flow through, and that will pretty much really take care of it. And what happened is they just, as you see, they're trying to sell it for five cents of the dollar. And that's really...

That has nothing to do with a smooth transition. That has to do with people really trying to stop our nation. And all it means, really, is that we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more, not even talking about the time. Time would be pretty long. But we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on building the same wall that we already have. And people have already come back to us

that have deals at five cents and four cents and one guy at three cents on the dollar, and they offered to sell it back to us at more money than it cost us to build substantially. Can you believe it? So they make a deal with the United States to buy it for pennies, and then they call us and they say, "Do you want to buy it back? We'll sell it back to you for hundreds of dollars a foot." Hundreds of dollars, from pennies to hundreds of dollars a foot.

And we can't let this take place. Now, we're going to go -- I spoke with the Attorney General of Texas. I spoke to the senators of Texas. I spoke to a lot of people. And hopefully, they'll be able to stop. We're going to be, you know, having a restraining order. But just think about how ridiculous it is. And this is just people that don't want this country to succeed. And this has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican. This has to do with

common sense. We won on common sense, and this is maybe one of the most egregious examples I've seen. So the people that are buying it or trying to buy it are trying to make a deal with us to sell it back at hundreds of times more, hundreds of times more than we paid. And this is all because the Democrats. So I'm asking today Joe Biden to please stop selling the oil. We're going to use that to create a strong barrier to

And it worked. That's why our numbers were so good. It really worked, and it worked well. And it's very expensive to do. And I'm asking Joe Biden to stop his people from giving it away. It's something that people can't even believe is happening. So hopefully Joe will be able to stop it.

We'll soon unleash American energy, and this will be done at levels not seen before, issuing quick approvals for pipelines, drilling, and other infrastructure. It'll be clean energy, and we'll bring in the price of electricity, and we're going to bring it down fast. We're also going to create clean coal. Clean coal is something that has really taken over. We have coal that will last for over 1,000 years. We have so much coal.

And with the process, it becomes clean coal. It's very powerful energy, unlike wind. It's very, very powerful. And we're going to be doing a lot of clean coal for the people of West Virginia and others, Wyoming, so many states. We have great states. And they'll be happy to hear it. But we're going to be very much into clean coal. I don't ever use the word coal. I use the word clean coal.

And I'll keep my promise to pass historic tax cuts for American families, workers, and businesses that create jobs in America. As you know, we're giving tax cuts if they do it here. We brought it down from 44%, 42%. In some cases, it was 39%. We brought it all the way down to 21%. And now we're bringing it down to 15%, but only if they make their product, their car, or whatever they're doing in the United States and the U.S.,

And people are thrilled. I've had the smartest people on Wall Street call me. They said, where did you get that idea? And it doesn't seem that complicated, right? But it's like the paperclip. Nobody ever thought of it. One guy thought of it. Everybody looked at it. They said, wow, that was a good idea. Why didn't I think of it? But we're bringing it down six more points, and that will put us really at the...

The best level we've ever had for bringing in business -- we've never been down to that level -- will be among the lowest-taxed states, and a lot of businesses are going to come in. Between that and our taxing and tariff policies, we're going to have business like nobody's ever seen in this country before. That's why we're, you know, having a 41-year record in optimism from small businesses and big businesses.

And I'll keep my promise to pass historic tax cuts for families, workers, and businesses that create jobs in America. Any business that invests $1 billion or more in the United States will be eligible for fully expedited permits and approvals, including environmental approvals from the federal government. So when companies come in, if they're going to invest a billion dollars or more, there'll be many of them. And they'll go into Detroit, and they'll go into a lot of places where we want them.

You saw how well I did with the autoworkers. We did unbelievably well. You saw how well we did with the Teamsters and also the non-union were record 98%, 97%. Nobody's ever got numbers like that because we're bringing business back, and they're all coming back. We lost them over years of stupidity, I call it. I call it the years of stupidity, the decades of stupidity.

Through the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has been working very hard with various people, including Vivek. We're going to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. And I can only tell you -- I'll give you a little early report -- they're finding things that you wouldn't even believe. So we're looking to save maybe $2 trillion.

And it'll have no impact. Actually, it'll make life better, but it'll have no impact on people. It's not like we're -- we will never cut Social Security or things like that. It's just waste, fraud, and abuse.

and will immediately restore the sovereign borders of the United States and stop illegal immigration, which is costing us, I believe, trillions of dollars a year. I think it's a cost that nobody has ever seen anything like it. I don't know how can you be satisfied releasing prisoners into the United States. Think of this.

prisoners from jails all over the world, not just in South America. From the Congo, I would talk about it all the time. They're a very big sender of people. But from all over the world, they're sending prisoners out of their jails. Some of their jails are empty, and they will be empty soon if this ever continued. I spoke with the president of Mexico, and as you know, I spoke with Justin Trudeau of Canada, and we told them,

It's not fair, not right. You can't let these people come into our country. And they understand they're very much unnoticed, and they're going to have to stop this from happening. They're going to have to stop it. We lose a lot of money to Mexico. We lose a lot of money to Canada, tremendous amount. We're subsidizing Canada. We're subsidizing Mexico. That can't go on. And I get along with the people of Mexico and Canada very well, but we can't let that happen. Why are we...

Why are we supporting and giving other countries hundreds of billions of dollars? It's not fair. It's not right. And the people of Mexico and Canada fully understand that. We've talked about it before, but now we're doing something about it. We started, and then we had to fix the COVID situation, and that's what we did.

But now we're doing it. We're doing it from the beginning. Howard will be largely in charge. We'll be working on it together. Howard's terrific. He's done a fantastic job, and he's really helped us a lot with transition. And there we leave President-elect Donald Trump discussing Howard Lutnick, of course. And he's been discussing tax cuts being promised, also asking on current President Biden to stop selling the border wall parts. He's seeking a restraining order for border wall parts sales, he says, criticizing basically the administration's

selling of border wall parts, he says. They're going to be fighting as well what they call federal workers return to office waiver. And there's work underway to slash regulation more broadly. He name checks Vivek and, of course, Elon Musk there. And they made some progress as well in stopping the war in Ukraine. We want to go back to also, though, the business being

announced by, of course, the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son. He's the founder. He was coming on to talk about the $100 billion that's going to be invested by SoftBank into the United States over the next four years, the 100,000 jobs made. And in fact, he was saying he's going to try and make it even bigger, 200,000 potentially. Let's get to Mike Sheppard. And just let's focus first on the tech side of all of this, because it's deja vu. We saw half the amount promised.

And they are said to have been delivered by Massa back in 2016.

This is an echo of what we saw eight years ago, almost to the day when Masayoshi Son made this promise at Trump Tower of a $50 billion investment with 50,000 jobs. And as Peter, our colleague, discussed earlier in the program, he largely made good on that. Trump is putting him on the spot today a little bit, already inking this $100

billion dollar promise, 100,000 jobs, and trying to get him to double even that. And we heard Peter talk about how Masayoshi Son may not have all that much in the tank to be able to pull it off, but at the same time, we heard Son talk about how he has such confidence in the incoming administration that maybe this will be a way to help him gain some of those investments and gain that capital he needs. And the support

of the next administration, the support of Donald Trump as president shouldn't come as a surprise, Mike.

No, not at all. And what was interesting also was how the president, after Assange left the stage, he talked about his commitment to trying to, I guess, revive and reinvigorate the economy from the business perspective, not only by cutting corporate tax rates, but by trying to cut red tape. And just last week, we heard him make the pledge that he reiterated today that anyone investing

billion dollars or more in the U.S. would get speedier permit review. And that has been an issue that we've heard energy companies and even tech companies bring up. The tech companies that are getting into AI have such energy demands that they need for their data centers. And without that kind of support to speed those projects, they see their AI ambitions at risk of being slowed. We can indeed see on Truth Social where President-elect Trump had to

discuss the $1 billion or more that can be allocated to the United States and therefore getting that expedited approval and permitting.

Mike, it is seemingly all about AI, all about energy when it comes to massive investment. Last time, it seemed to be a whole host of people talking to the hundreds of companies that SoftBank put money into it via the Vision Fund and indeed by SoftBank directly. We already see this money being allocated to OpenAI, for example. Are we expecting a mixture of startups and publicly traded companies? Is there anything discerning as to the direction of travel of which companies are going to be backed?

You know, it's really tough to say right now exactly how this money would be applied. If it refers back to already planned investments by SoftBank in other ventures and vehicles, we just don't have those details. And in a way, just like Trump's

Truth Social post on cutting red tape and regulation. We really don't know exactly how he intends to do that either. So we're going to have to see how this unfolds. And there will be more to come from Masayoshi Son, how much of this money gets deployed into the U.S., how quickly and toward whom. And I think there are a lot of startups, including people who have ties into the administration, who will be very interested in that kind of a partnership.

Mike Shepherd, always a joy. Thank you for breaking it all down. Meanwhile, coming up, we'll have plenty more on the future of the media landscape, as well as costs of AI's power-hungry features. More next, this is Bloomberg Technology. 89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority, according to research by Boston Consulting Group. But with AI tools popping up everywhere, how do you separate the helpful from the hype? The right choice is crucial, which is why teams at Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly.

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We are watching Bloomberg Technology right now, and we're bringing you the latest out of, of course, Trump speaking in Mar-a-Lago at a press conference discussing the future of TikTok at the moment. So keep a close eye. They said they're going to be taking a look at TikTok. We know at the moment that they...

TikTok itself did not get the pause that it wanted to see on the potential divestment or ban that is likely to come into effect on January the 19th, the day before Trump is inaugurated. So taking a look at the social media platform TikTok. We'll bring you any more breaking news coming from that press conference. But we want to check in on the markets because we are currently on the risk on attitude. We're up NASDAQ 100, almost a percentage point higher. Chipmakers, Broadcom leading us on the higher side as well.

We're seeing Bitcoin up some 3%, 4%, a new record high. Once again, is MicroStrategy going to be inducted into the NASDAQ 100? More money, therefore, going there from allocated funds. And what does that mean? More money probably likely to be spent on Bitcoin by that particular name. Meanwhile, we want to go back to what has been the story of the day and its investment into the United States as well. Coming from SoftBank, Masa was just at that press conference in Maranago. Masa Sun, of course, CEO of SoftBank, committing he's going to try

$200 billion, but he has committed to $100 billion of investment in AI and energy and infrastructure. That following on, of course, for the $50 billion he promised back in 2016.

Armholding is interestingly down on the news, we're off by 5%. It happens to be having its day in court, we understand, being reported that Arm and Qualcomm had their first day in court. Of course, Arm and Qualcomm vying over the future of their relationship. But maybe some hypotheticals as to what Arm would mean in terms of the 90% holding that SoftBank has in it if he's going to be raising more funds.

Let's also discuss what it means for the investment landscape more broadly here in the United States at the moment from a VC perspective. Look, there's plenty of news when we're thinking about American AI startups, and we've got a perfect voice on that. Accel partner, Mark Whitegrand, is with us. Today's VC spotlight. Matt,

you are someone who's just been allocating, interestingly, to a public company that's, of course, based in Europe, but thinking about AI infrastructure, about access to the cloud. Nimbus is the name of the company you're looking at, but you're also just thinking of the turf warfare that's out there to allocate money to generative AI. This is just going to

add to the party, right? - Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, thanks for having me on, but we at Accel are big believers that we're only in the early innings of laying down the infrastructure that's gonna be required to actually support this massive technological wave of AI. So this committed investment doesn't surprise me at all to see it coming in because we do need that infrastructure. So I'm excited to see more infrastructure being laid down for AI. - Okay, where are you seeing the biggest opportunities? You've just made this allocation of funds into a publicly traded

allocator of cloud. We've got CoreWeave already out there as a big pivot from all these companies that were looking at Bitcoin mining and now getting into the world of cloud computing.

But what next in terms of areas that you think are fruitful? Yeah, absolutely. So at Accel, we broadly invest across two different facets of AI. We think about infrastructure, which Nebious is very much an example of that. Also investing in companies like Scale AI in the infrastructure layer, helping build the data engine for AI. But then we can't forget about the applications that are going to run on that infrastructure. So we see great opportunities in both

enterprise and consumer applications. Our most recent investment in the consumer side of things was into a company called Speak, supporting language learning for AI. So that is the tussle, right? At the moment, there is an awful lot of money being allocated to building

picks and shovels, the infrastructure, and many feel that valuations potentially have gone out of whack there. We now go into the killer applications that many are just still waiting on. Do you think we're actually there and people aren't seeing the application of generative AI right now, the real productivity gains?

Absolutely. We see it from the ground up and we see companies that are gaining real traction and driving real value both in enterprise and consumer. So although it is still the early innings and a lot of the emphasis has been on that infrastructure, the training to get us to the point where we can actually run inference on these models and get the value out of them, I think you're going to start to see particularly across 2025 and 2026 applications spring up both in enterprise and consumer that drive real value to the end user.

But then when I think of enterprise, you've got Salesforce all in on AgentForce, you've got Microsoft trying to offer it. So co-pilots, where is the space? Or is it actually that a lot of these startups will end up being eaten up by these bigger enterprise companies? That's the exit strategy.

Yeah, it's a really good question. So speaking on the infrastructure layer with Nebius, what we actually see is that by pairing their 400 software and hardware engineers against the problem of standing up infrastructure, but doing it with an AI-specific approach, we're able to offer a level of flexibility that the large incumbents offering generalized clouds just don't have in the ecosystem today. So that means that people can come to us

that need large amounts of compute that want bare metal and people can also come to us that just want an on-demand flexible experience with their infrastructure. So as always, you see the innovation in the early startups tackling some of the holes and open opportunities in the large incumbents and I expect to see the same thing. Salesforce obviously defending its territory but we see a ton of activity and agentic approaches and apps going after their exact market. So we'll continue to see it.

Is agentic AI going to be the next sort of over allocated area? I mean, we all got way too in the weeds when it came to chip and semiconductors for 2024. When it comes to 2025, we're all going to be parlaying in agentic AI.

I don't think it's overhyped at all. I think the reality is we're still in the early innings and the expectations are quite high on what agents are going to do within the enterprise application arena. And so it's easy to point at the flaws in agents today, but I tend to look at the progress of agents. And as an investor, I look at where value is going to be created over the next decade. And over the next decade, I think you're going to see really mature agents hit the market and scale in a meaningful way.

come when they're ready and fit for purpose and can talk to us a little bit more. Accel partner Matt Weigand, fascinating across the infrastructure and now, of course, the application layer too. Let's just move to public markets for a moment because the NASDAQ debut for tech startup Service Titan, bringing big windfalls for early investors, includes more than $1 million going to iconic growth, for example, over $800 million going to Bessemer Venture Partners.

This is all according to sources. And they told Katie Roof. Katie, bring us the breakdown on who the big winners were on this. Well, it was, of course, a listing that popped so much that many would say that some money was left on the table. Sure, absolutely. So there's a few things to get at here. But so Service Titan, you know, they're an L.A.-based software provider for like the plumbing industry, other home service providers. They've been around for a while. And so even though

they were valued pretty highly in some recent rounds, like almost $10 billion, because Iconic and Bessemer and Battery Ventures bought so many shares when it was such a young startup at a small price that

You know, ICONIC stands to gain over a billion dollars from this investment. I've confirmed Bessemer stands to gain over $800 million because even though they have about $900 million worth of shares, it costs roughly maybe $60 million to acquire those shares for Bessemer.

Katie Roof, all things on some of the allocations and those that are reaping the rewards when it comes to the latest IPOs. We really appreciate it. Thank you coming out from LA. Meanwhile, coming up, AI's energy demand shock. More on how businesses are preparing for a future that requires more resources. This is Blue Meg Technology.

The AI boom has caused one unintended consequence. Businesses, investors and society are now bracing for an energy demand shock that comes with utilizing the resource intensive features. Nirmal S. Lindhuan joins us now for what is a real deep dive into the implications of artificial intelligence.

that perhaps one Masayoshi Son is looking to help finance some of these issues. Yeah, what a coincidental timing for us to have just put out this piece on the massive infrastructure demands of AI and not just energy, right? We were talking about the demand on metals and mining, on land and real estate, on human beings, on data, on data centers, on steel, copper, gold, aluminum. And so

So if you put all of those together like we did in that massive AI supply chain piece that we did on Friday, you can understand and it's almost not surprising for someone like Masa to say, "Yeah, we'll drop $100 billion in the US

need it. The whole industry is going to be a lot more than $100 billion. So one might argue that these plans have already been quite in the making. To that point, we've reported long and hard about Sam Altman trying to gather sort of a table of international investors. A coalition, if you will. Yeah, a coalition, exactly. But how much are they looking on this being built in the United States or how geopolitically exposed can you still be?

You know, that's a really good question. And I think that there is a narrative that is playing out in the tech community right now that acknowledges no specific country has all of the resources that are necessary to build and dominate AI as a hub. And so we will have to look for allies. We will have to look for coalitions among like-minded

minded countries. That is what the tech community and executives like OpenAI and Nvidia are telling the administration in DC that it's time to be thinking about how we can pool our resources to own this technology but also control it in the proper ways. Do you think your story shocked anyone? Which story? Oh!

I would hope so. I mean, I would hope that it's a wake-up call. I think if there is one message that I'd like to send out of that AI supply chain data visualization, it is that for all the talk of AI making the world more efficient, quicker, less human resources intensive, it is actually an incredibly resource intensive, inefficient technology.

For now, at least. Linh Duan, it's a great story. Go read it. Meanwhile, that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. You do not want to forget our podcast. You'll find it on the Terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify and iHeart. This is Bloomberg Technology.

Join Bloomberg in Atlanta or via live stream on February 11th for The Future Investor, Finding the Opportunities. This 2025 event series will examine how companies are investing in their businesses to create efficiencies, innovate their products and services, and improve the customer experience. This series is proudly sponsored by Invesco QQQ. Register at BloombergLive.com slash Future Investor Atlanta.