Top Message

Realizing a
sustainable society

Guided by the corporate philosophy “Information Revolution — Happiness for everyone,” SoftBank Corp. regards realizing a sustainable society as one of its most essential management issues, identifying six material issues with which it must engage. These material issues are selected to connect our corporate philosophy and our “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy, and through the concept of “a world where all things, information and minds are connected,” we are determined to achieve group-wide business growth by resolving them, enhancing our corporate value and contributing to the realization of a sustainable world.

Building next-generation
social infrastructure
for a society
that coexists with AI

To realize a sustainable society and enhance our corporate value, we announced our long-term vision of providing next-generation social infrastructure essential to the development of a digital [QP1] society in May 2023. We stand at the advent of a society where people coexist with AI. Through the introduction of AI text generators, multimodal AI, AI video generators and other such models, we suddenly find ourselves in close proximity to AI, which is poised to further permeate everyday society. In a society that coexists with AI, a large amount of data is generated and undergoes heavy processing, consuming a vast amount of electricity. The next-generation social infrastructure SoftBank Corp. aims to build will handle this vast processing of AI-generated data and become an irreplaceable part of society, supporting people's lifestyles. This will require distributed AI data centers. Data centers are currently concentrated in Tokyo and Osaka, but by distributing them across the country, it will be possible to more effectively balance data processing and energy consumption. In FY2026, we will open a green data center in Tomakomai, Hokkaido that follows a local consumption model and exclusively uses renewable energy generated nearby for its operations. Here, we plan to build a large-scale computational framework to be utilized in generative AI development as well as other AI-related businesses, thus promoting the realization of next-generation social infrastructure.
As we build and develop the important infrastructure to support a society that coexists with AI, we must also respond to new risks. Depending on how it is used, AI may lead toward discriminatory evaluation and selection. I believe proactive efforts must be taken to address such anticipated ethical risks. At the Institute for AI and Beyond, we work with the University of Tokyo to research AI ethics and formulate AI ethics policies in order to proactively handle AI governance. To further strengthen such measures, we established our AI Governance Committee, whose membership includes outside experts, in April 2024. By leveraging the diverse perspectives and knowledge of these outside experts, our objective is to realize highly effective AI governance while creating AI governance that continuously improves upon itself. Thus, we are advancing our capacity to respond to risks.

Environmental initiatives

We believe that contributing to decarbonization across society through business activities and corporate activities is our duty as a company. We want to bring group-wide net GHG emissions from business activities, including those of our partner companies (Scope 3), to zero by 2050. To achieve net zero, we aim to effectively switch 100% of our energy consumption to renewable energy (with at least 50% of the electricity obtained from stable renewable sources) by FY2030. In May 2023, we announced that we had formed new long-term, large-scale renewable energy procurement contracts with power producers. Using mainly renewable energy with additionality^* to procure about 2 billion kWh, which is equivalent to the annual volume of energy used by our communications business, we will reduce GHG emissions. Thus, we will steadily proceed on our path to realize decarbonization.

[Note]

1. *
   Renewable energy with additionality: Procurement from new (additional) renewable energy generation that has the effect of stimulating the creation of renewable energy generation facilities

In closing

SoftBank Corp. has promoted various initiatives to realize a sustainable society and enhance our corporate value. As a result, we were selected for inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, a leading global ESG index, for the second year in a row (2022-2023). We continue to be recognized for contributing to society through our business actions, but there are many efforts that must be undertaken for the sake of future society. To meet the expectations of our stakeholders, we will continue our measures to solve social issues and realize a sustainable society as we aim to be the company needed most by people and society.