SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son challenged Elon Musk's vision of orbital data centers during SoftBank's annual shareholder meeting, arguing that the AI arms race will be won by whoever builds the most compute capacity on the ground. Son's reasoning is that electricity savings from space-based facilities are minimal compared to the dominant costs of chips, hardware, transport, and latency, and he suggested these space solutions could take a decade or more to become viable. Son stated, “He who strikes first wins.” SoftBank has committed to investing hundreds of billions of dollars globally in Earth-based data center infrastructure, including a $500 billion pledge tied to AI initiatives in the US alone, encompassing partnerships with OpenAI and Project Stargate. Son described Musk as a “remarkable agent of change” while publicly disagreeing with his orbital data center vision.