Masa's $3.7 Billion Bonfire: SoftBank Posts $7 Billion Loss After Torching Deposits On AI Power Gear As Interest Costs Double

Buy now, figure out the specs later. That, in one line, was SoftBank's strategy for powering the biggest AI data center buildout on the planet. 

And on Tuesday, it sent Masayoshi Son the invoice: SoftBank Group reported a net loss of ¥1.12 trillion ($7.1 billion) for the July-September quarter, its first loss in almost two years, when Wall Street was looking for a profit of ¥129 billion. The biggest single culprit was a ¥597 billion ($3.7 billion) loss on power generation equipment that the OpenAI backer had rushed to reserve for its US data centers, led by the 8 gigawatt campus in Pike County, Ohio... and then decided it didn't need after all, non-refundable deposits and all.