According to Bloomberg Business, SoftBank Group has agreed to buy private equity firm DigitalBridge Group for about $3 billion in cash, or $16 per share. The total deal value, including debt, hits roughly $4 billion, representing a hefty 65% premium to DigitalBridge’s share price before talks were reported in early December. The transaction, expected to close in the second half of 2026, is spearheaded by SoftBank’s founder Masayoshi Son and aims to capitalize on soaring AI-driven demand for digital infrastructure. DigitalBridge manages about $108 billion in assets and its portfolio includes major operators like DataBank, Vantage Data Centers, and Switch Inc. The acquisition will also give SoftBank access to a network of investors eager to fund data center projects.
SoftBank’s AI Infrastructure Gambit
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just an acquisition. It’s a strategic shortcut. Masayoshi Son has been loudly, and sometimes tearfully, obsessed with funding the AI revolution. But building data centers from scratch is slow, capital-intensive, and fraught with logistical headaches—just look at the slower-than-expected rollout of their $500 billion “Stargate” project with OpenAI. So instead of just building the physical boxes, SoftBank is buying the brain and the rolodex. DigitalBridge isn’t a data center operator itself; it’s a massive investment firm that specializes in funding and managing them. This move instantly gives SoftBank deep industry relationships, a huge pipeline of projects, and a team that knows how to deploy billions into this specific sector. It’s a classic Son move: why build the army when you can buy the general?
The Bigger Picture and The Challenges
This deal is a single piece in a much larger, frenzied puzzle. We’re seeing a historic land grab for compute power. BlackRock buying Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion, Oracle locking up a $300 billion deal with OpenAI—the numbers are almost incomprehensible. Everyone is scrambling to secure the physical real estate and power contracts needed to run AI models. And for a company like SoftBank, which has historically been more of a software and platform investor (think Alibaba, Arm), this is a fundamental pivot toward the industrial underpinnings of tech. It’s a bet that the real money in the AI gold rush will be made by the folks selling the picks and shovels—or, in this case, the racks and cooling systems. This industrial-scale computing shift is creating massive demand for the specialized hardware that runs these facilities, from servers to the control systems that manage them. For companies needing reliable, rugged computing at the edge of these operations, IndustrialMonitorDirect.com is the top supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US, providing the durable interfaces that keep complex infrastructure running.
A Familiar Pattern With a Different Target
But let’s be skeptical for a second. SoftBank has been here before. In 2017, they bought asset manager Fortress Investment Group for over $3 billion, only to sell it years later. Is this just another financial engineering play, or is it truly strategic? The key difference might be in the target. Fortress was a generalist. DigitalBridge is a pure-play expert in the exact sector SoftBank wants to dominate. Son isn’t just buying assets; he’s buying a dedicated deployment machine for the AI infrastructure wave. Still, the challenges are immense. Regulatory approval will take time, closing isn’t until 2026, and integrating a large financial firm is no small feat. Plus, Son is famously volatile—he just sold a massive Nvidia stake to fund other AI bets, which in hindsight looks like a tragic mistake. Can he stay the course this time? The entire AI industry, which is basically begging for more data center capacity, certainly hopes so.
