The Swedish-Swiss industrial giant ABB had initially planned to spin off the Robotics division and list it separately on the stock exchange. Instead, the robots are now being sold to Softbank for a price tag of almost 5.4 billion dollars, ABB announces in a press release. The ABB share rises by one percent.
ABB's robots are used on a large scale in the manufacturing industry, among other things by car manufacturers where the robots assemble vehicles and the like. The robot division has approximately 7,000 employees, out of a total of around 110,000 employees in the ABB Group.
For Softbank, it is a further investment in AI, this time of a more physical nature in the form of robots, to "merge artificial superintelligence and robotics - and drive a pioneering development that will drive humanity forward", writes the Japanese investment giant.
Softbank is already one of the larger owners of Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT.
