Apple has confirmed its investment of $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund. The fund is expected to be launched this year, according to Bloomberg. The fund is being led by Masayoshi Son and is reported to be the biggest technology venture fund in the world.
Apart from Apple, the fund is also getting support from Saudi Arabia's sovereign fund and Qualcomm. The venture fund will focus on supporting startups working in the cutting edge fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and deep learning. It is believed that Apple's main purpose behind the investment is to gain better insight into emerging technologies.
SoftBank Vision Fund was announced in October last year. The fund will have a corpus of $100 billion, out of which $25 billion will be contributed by SoftBank itself. Saudi sovereign fund will invest additional $45 billion.
Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, has pledged to invest $50 billion of the fund in the US. The investment is expected to create 50,000 jobs. The promise received accolades from President-elect Donald Trump.
The new investment by Apple eludes to the strategy adopted by the technology company. Apple recently invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing Technology Co. The company CEO Tim Cook had described the investment as "unusual."
Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said: "We believe their new fund will speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple." The technology giant has collaborated with SoftBank in the past.
SoftBank had handled iPhone sales in Japan where it was the exclusive iPhone seller in the country. The collaboration led to record sales volume for the smartphone.
Unlike most of the technology companies, Apple does not have its venture capital arm. However, the company has massive cash pile, most of which is stashed abroad. Apple is likely to be inundated with huge tax bills to repatriate the cash back to the US, making it more attractive for the company to invest the money abroad.