SoftBank stock hits its first record high in 24 years — Arm and AI helped it get there

SoftBank Group shares hit a record high on Thursday, just as the company's massive tech investment arm shows signs of recovery and its outspoken founder Masayoshi Son emerged back into the public spotlight to align the Japanese giant to a future in artificial intelligence.

The firm has also been helped by the public market success of British chip designer Arm, in which Softbank has a majority stake.

Shares of the Japanese giant closed at a record high of 11,190.00 Japanese yen on Thursday — a far cry from the dotcom crash of the early 2000s and a more recent downturn for the company during the tech market troubles of 2021 and 2022.

Son founded SoftBank in 1981, back when the company distributed software. It went public in Japan in 1994, and, amid the internet boom, made a $2 million investment in Yahoo in the middle of that decade.

That started off the company's tech investments.

The rise of the internet and of Yahoo pushed SoftBank's stock to a peak closing price of 10,111.1 yen on Feb. 18, 2000. Three days prior, the firm's shares had hit an intraday high of 11,000 yen.

As internet stocks came crashing down, so too did SoftBank's share price, which at one point sank more than 90% below its dotcom peak.

It wasn't until nearly 21 years later, on Feb. 16, 2021, that SoftBank exceeded its previous record-high close.

The recent rise to a share price peak has been volatile since Son positioned SoftBank as a visionary pioneer with the 2017 launch of a massive technology investment arm — the Vision Fund.

SoftBank made dozens of bets on tech companies across the world, some of which turned sour. Office sharing startup WeWork was perhaps among the highest-profile names. But some of SoftBank's investments in Chinese firms also took a hit