SoftBank Corp‘s earnings just gave a real answer to a question that’s hung over the company for years: do all those AI infrastructure bets actually pay off? For this quarter, at least, the numbers say yes.
The Japanese telecom giant reported a 3% rise in Q2 net income, reaching 150.1 billion yen, roughly $950 million, on revenue that climbed 9.4% to 1.81 trillion yen, about $11.5 billion. AI and cloud services did most of the heavy lifting here, with enterprise sales up 12% to $1.7 billion and operating income in that segment jumping 28%.
CEO Junichi Miyakawa put it plainly on Tuesday’s earnings call: AI and cloud revenue grew 31%, and he expects that pace to hold for another two years. “We are entering the monetization phase of those investments,” he told analysts, a fairly direct way of saying the payoff is finally showing up on the balance sheet.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting where SoftBank is choosing to spend next. The company unveiled a $634 million partnership with Seven & i, the parent of 7-Eleven, aimed at building what it calls “next-generation lifestyle infrastructure.” PayPay and Sumitomo Mitsui Card are joining the investment too, with plans to bring automation, robotics, AI-driven predictive ordering, and next-generation supply chain tools into convenience stores. Miyakawa said he’d eventually like to take the model global.
Even so, this pivot fits SoftBank’s broader mid-term plan: shifting from a phone carrier into what it calls a provider of “new social infrastructure.”
At the same time, SoftBank is also preparing to enter the US neo-cloud market alongside its parent company, with services expected to roll out gradually starting next year. That business will lean on SoftBank’s existing GPU cloud, AI data center know-how, and its Infrinia cloud OS, which helps share GPU resources more efficiently across customers.
Meanwhile, even the traditional telecom business held up better than expected. Mobile and broadband revenue rose 4% to $4.9 billion, though operating income there dipped slightly, something Miyakawa said should reverse over the full fiscal year.
