Masayoshi Son's jet returns to Tokyo from Texas after Stargate site visit

The Texas visit comes just months after SoftBank secured a $40 billion bridge loan in March 2026 to fund further investments in OpenAI, per a Reuters report. That loan, combined with Son's existing $30 billion commitment to OpenAI through Vision Fund 2, underscores the scale of his bet on artificial intelligence. The Stargate project itself has faced skepticism from economists about its revenue potential, as noted by TIME in a profile of Son, but the aircraft's movement suggests the chairman remains hands-on with the buildout — evaluating sites, meeting partners, or reviewing progress at the Abilene campus, which is expected to scale to 20 data centers by 2029.

This trip fits a well-established pattern for Masayoshi Son: frequent shuttles between Tokyo and U.S. investment hubs, particularly Silicon Valley, but increasingly Texas as AI infrastructure becomes a national priority. The aircraft's recurring destinations include KSFO, KSJC, and now KSAT, reflecting Son's pivot from software and telecoms into AI hardware and data centers. With SoftBank holding roughly 90% of Arm Holdings and Son personally owning about one-third of SoftBank shares, every flight between Japan and the U.S. carries the weight of a $180 billion war chest being deployed in real time.

For a man who has described Stargate as the "beginning of our golden age," the round trip from Tokyo to Texas and back — roughly 24 hours of flight time and an estimated 241.5 tonnes of CO₂ across his tracked movements — is a small price for maintaining the personal oversight that has defined his four-decade career. Whether or not Masayoshi Son was actually on N302TR, the aircraft's logbook tells a story of a billionaire doubling down on American AI, one transoceanic leg at a time.