Group, led by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, plans to approach private equity firms Apollo Global Management (NYSE:APO) and Brookfield for funding assistance with the Stargate AI project, Nikkei reported.

Bannon tore into Musk, revealing another fissure in the MAGA world over Trump's highly touted Stargate project.

Trump was joined by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison at the White House to announce the venture, dubbed Stargate, which they said would deploy $100 billion immediately with the goal of eventually spending $500 billion for the construction of data centers and physical campuses.

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981. It has invested millions in some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies.

SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son is shifting his focus away from investments in China and toward the US, as seen with his involvement with President Donald Trump and the recently announced Stargate.

Mr. Trump had claimed the A.I. announcement as an early trophy, taking credit for the companies’ decision to spend up to $500 billion building data centers.

The rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has stretched American infrastructure, with data centres emerging as a particular bottleneck. Cutting-edge chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude require enormous amounts of data and computing power to train and run.

Elon Musk had sharp words for a private-sector partnership touted this week by the Trump administration to hasten the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk said of two of the participants in the $500 billion initiative, OpenAI and SoftBank, on his social media site X.

Stargate: Analysts have noted that Microsoft has become less willing to spend even more money financing the computing power OpenAI requires to retain a lead in AI.

OpenAI CEO Salm Altman dismissed Musk's claims and instead offered him to visit the first site, which is already under way. He said, "This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn't always what's optimal for your companies, but in your new role I hope you'll mostly put us first."

US President Donald Trump's sensational announcement of the US$500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project has grabbed headlines and stoked market