Trump and SoftBank Promise to Create 100,000 AI Jobs. It Won’t Be Easy.

SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son stood besides President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, and announced a commitment to invest $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years—and create 100,000 jobs. The investments will be concentrated in AI.

“My confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory,” Son said at the news conference.

SoftBank is an investment holding company with a range of technology investments all over the world, but especially in the U.S. At the end of September, the total value of its investments was $136 billion, so the new commitment would represent a substantial expansion of SoftBank’s balance sheet.

Raising that sort of money may prove difficult, but the bigger obstacle could be the commitment on jobs—the focus on AI companies, in particular, complicates the goal. AI companies spend a lot on salaries, but these are some of the most expensive employees in the world right now. And they don’t tend to employ a lot of people overall

OpenAI, which has raised $18 billion and has a private market value of $157 billion, has 1,372 employees. To fulfill Trump and Son’s commitment, in other words, the investments would have to create 73 AI companies on the scale of OpenAI.

“A lot of advanced tech these days, including AI, is capital intensive and also highly dependent on high-paid skilled workers,” labor economist Guy Berger of the Burning Glass Institute told Barron’s . “I’m not sure how much head count $100 billion spread out over four years gets you.”

A selection of a dozen AI start-ups with valuations over a billion dollars reveals the uphill climb to the 100,000 jobs goal. These companies have raised a combined $42 billion and have an aggregate private market value of $309 billion, according to FactSet. Anthropic, which has raised almost $12 billion, has only 425 employees. All told, these companies employ less than 10,000 workers, an average of 785 workers per start-up.

Databricks, a data analytics start-up with a valuation of $43 billion, accounts for almost half of those employees. Excluding Databricks, the per start-up employee count falls to 399.

Other barriers in the labor market exist, as well. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2%, but narrow that down to workers with masters and doctoral degrees who are most likely to be AI employees, and the rate drops to 2.0% and 1.0%, respectively. In all, there are only 483,000 workers with advanced degrees looking for work, and most of them aren’t AI engineers.

“The labor market is not super loose right now,” Berger said. “A lot of gross jobs created here might simply involve reallocating people who already have jobs.”

Monday’s press conference recalled a similar one from 2016, when Trump and Son stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and promised $50 billion in U.S. investment and 50,000 jobs. SoftBank didn’t reply to a request for comment about the progress of that 2016 commitment.

Stock futures are little changed Sunday evening as investors await the release of key reports on the labor market during another abbreviated week of trading, including Friday’s jobs numbers.

At 6:13 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were flat; the S&P 500 futures gained 0.1%; and Nasdaq Composite futures gained 0.1%.

Stocks started out the new year on a muted note. Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 260 points, or 0.6%, to 42,732.13, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The S&P 500 was down 0.48% to 5,942.47, and the Nasdaq Composite closed down 0.51% to 19,621.86.

Stock markets will close Thursday in honor of former President Jimmy Carter, who died late last month. Also this week, several reports on the labor market are expected, including Friday’s jobs report for December. Economists expect the economy added 153,000 jobs last month, lower than November’s reading.

This week also features oral arguments at the Supreme Court in TikTok’s battle against the U.S. government, with a potential ban of the video-sharing app looming later this month.

Among the week’s other economic reports, the Federal Reserve will release the meetings of its December meeting, and three Fed governors are speaking publicly this week. On Monday, Governor Lisa Cook will be at the University of Michigan Law School’s Seventh Conference on Law and Macroeconomics.

Gov. Christopher J. Waller on Wednesday will discuss the economic outlook at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Conference Center in Paris.

And Gov. Michelle Bowman on Thursday will reflect on 2024’s monetary policy, economic performance, and lessons for banking regulation at the California Bankers Association’s 2025 Bank Presidents Seminar in La Quinta, Calif.