By Robbie Whelan, Eliot Brown and Josh Dawsey
The billionaire tech investor Masayoshi Son has big dreams of working closely with the Trump administration to revitalize U.S. manufacturing -- and the promise of billions in Japanese cash to help pay for it.
After months of discussions with officials at the White House and Commerce Department, the chief executive officer of Tokyo-based SoftBank Group is hammering out details of a plan that could see him marshaling hundreds of billions of dollars to build Trump-branded industrial parks around the country.
The facilities would be built largely on federal land, using funds pledged by the Japanese government as part of a recent trade deal, and would produce components for artificial-intelligence infrastructure, according to people familiar with the discussions. The funds could begin flowing as soon as early 2026.
President Trump has signaled that he supports Son's plan in concept, according to people familiar with the matter, and discussions between SoftBank and the administration are continuing. "President Trump's relationships with business leaders across industries and geographies are playing a key role in securing the trillions in investments that are helping build America's next Golden Age," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
Details are in flux, but current plans call for SoftBank to help facilitate the construction of factory clusters, cranking out fiber-optic cable, data-center equipment, and, ultimately, AI chips. Japanese tech companies would supply much of the expertise behind the new ventures , while the facilities would be owned by the federal government once built.
The effort, which still faces obstacles in getting off the drawing board, is quintessential Son, a creature of the boom-bust cycle of Silicon Valley known for taking big swings when the market gets hot. Many have paid off with tens of billions of dollars in profits -- including early bets on Yahoo, Alibaba and the chip company Arm Holdings -- while others have led to costly black eyes, such as WeWork.
While Son had been predicting for years that SoftBank would be at the forefront of an imminent revolution in AI and robotics, it missed out on the early years of investing in generative-AI companies. It has partially made up for the slow start by forging a deep relationship with OpenAI, including a commitment of $30 billion to the company this year. Son has also cultivated a relationship with the Trump administration, positioning himself as a champion of its agenda to secure AI supremacy by onshoring more high-tech manufacturing.
Known as Project Crystal Land inside SoftBank, Son's vision has evolved considerably over the past six months. Over the course of several meetings starting this past spring, he initially pitched top administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, on building a $1 trillion industrial city in the Arizona desert north of Phoenix, akin to a U.S. version of the Chinese electronics hub of Shenzhen, according to people who attended the meetings. Over the summer, Son pitched the project to Trump directly at a meeting , people familiar with the pitch said .
The details Son presented were ambitious to the point of science fiction. To the president, Son spun visions of robot-filled semiconductor-fabrication plants, chip-packaging factories, processing plants, and housing for workers and managers -- all in an area the size of Los Angeles, the people said .
Son discussed with officials the idea of making the Arizona project one of Trump's "Freedom Cities" -- a concept for high-tech developments on federal land floated during his 2024 presidential campaign -- people familiar with the matter said. At the time, the administration was considering issuance of an executive order to try to push the Freedom Cities concept forward, but momentum has slowed on that effort.
After those meetings, the blueprint for the project changed. In place of one megadevelopment, the administration began pushing for a network of "Trump Industrial Parks," according to an administration official, with manufacturing infrastructure built on federal land. Son pitched a revised version of Project Crystal Land reflecting those discussions, people familiar with the details said. Futuristic robotics and housing were dropped, and the first phase of the proposed project would be paid for using funds committed by the Japanese government as part of the trade deal reached in July.
Under the deal terms, the U.S. agreed to limit tariffs on imported Japanese goods, lowering auto tariffs from 25% to 15%, and Japan agreed to open up trade in U.S. goods including cars and trucks, rice and other agricultural products, the president said.
Japan also committed to investing $550 billion in the U.S. across strategic U.S. industries, including energy, semiconductor manufacturing and shipbuilding. The deal gives the U.S. the right to select where the money goes, and the U.S. would keep 90% of profits on the projects after Japan recoups its investment. A representative for Japan's government declined to comment.
In October, the White House published a list of potential infrastructure investments that could be funded by the trade-deal money, including several nuclear power plants and tens of billions of dollars in energy and AI-infrastructure investments.
The projects described had heavy overlap with the plan Son had envisioned for Project Crystal Land, and Trump has proposed partnerships worth tens of billions of dollars with a host of Japanese companies, including TDK, Mitsubishi Electric and Hitachi. The initial funding for the projects could be released as soon as the first quarter of 2026, an administration official said.
It is far from clear if even the revised version of Son's idea will become a reality. It would likely require enormous levels of funding beyond Japan's investment, approvals for using federal land, and far more planning to figure out details of what all the factories would produce and who would build them.
SoftBank's involvement in another giant pledge by Son -- a $500 billion data-center project with OpenAI announced in January -- has yet to get off the ground. Meanwhile, a spending spree on data centers, which hasn't seen a corresponding rise in income for AI companies, has raised worries among investors that a bubble is building in AI infrastructure.
For the first phase of the initiative, Son has approached the Japanese electronics companies Toshiba, Murata Manufacturing and Fujikura, seeking commitments to invest in data-center infrastructure manufacturing. Among the projects discussed were building power transformers, fiber-optic cables, power modules and other hardware needed to support major computing clusters, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Toshiba spokesperson said the firm regularly engages in broad discussions with SoftBank and is open to exploring opportunities. Murata and Fujikura didn't respond to requests for comment.
In future phases, Son has his sights set on building chip-manufacturing plants, known as foundries or fabs, which could compete with the companies in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea that currently dominate that industry, some of the people familiar with the plan said.
The Trump administration has made it clear that bolstering U.S. semiconductor manufacturing is a priority. This year, Lutnick asked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which manufactures about 90% of the world's supply of advanced AI chips, to expand its investments in the U.S.
In March, the company obliged, announcing that it would increase its U.S. investments to $165 billion from $65 billion, including pledges to build three new chip-fabrication plants.
While SoftBank has approached TSMC about working on Project Crystal Land, the Taiwanese company has indicated that it isn't interested, according to people familiar with the matter.
After a rough couple of years in which rising interest rates caused Softbank's bets on startups to sour, the company is once again riding high. Even after a recent pullback, SoftBank's stock has more than tripled since April. Its investment in Arm has surged, as investors are bullish on its use in AI, and SoftBank's investment from the spring in OpenAI has nearly doubled in value.
Son sought to build bridges with Trump even before he returned to the White House. Standing by the president-elect in Mar-a-Lago last December, he pledged to spend $100 billion in the U.S. over four years. Then, on the second day of Trump's second administration, he attended a White House press conference with the president and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion data-center project called Stargate .
In August, SoftBank invested $2 billion in Intel, just before the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the struggling American chip company, thrusting SoftBank into a dramatic turnaround effort that has become a pet project for Trump, Lutnick and others in the administration.
Lutnick has been working closely with SoftBank along with others in the administration and officials at the Interior Department about the potential use of federal land. Discussions of this issue have centered on how much of the project might be built on public land, whether SoftBank would seek government funding for it, how to supply energy for it, and what the permitting requirements would be for such an arrangement, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com, Eliot Brown at Eliot.Brown@wsj.com and Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 04, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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