To the tech community’s surprise, SoftBank, the company behind the Pepper robot and, at the same time one of the major players on the market, announced an important deal with Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
In an attempt to move deeper into robotics, SoftBank acquired Boston Dynamics, the creators of the Big Dog project, as well as bipedal robotics firm Schaft, reports TechCrunch.
One of the company’s representatives revealed that the terms of the deal won’t be disclosed. However, we do know that these are the only two robotics firms, initially owned by Alphabet, which were part of the deal.
One step ahead of competition
Until now, there were a lot of rumors about Google wanting to get rid of Boston Dynamics and the offers kept coming. To be more specific, automotive company Toyota was also interested in acquiring the two businesses.
On a second thought, the deal makes complete sense. Japan is one of the countries where robots are insanely popular, not to mention the impressive innovations made here, as well as the big amounts of money invested in developing such technologies. However, it looks like SoftBank beat Toyota in this race!
“Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots,” said SoftBank Group Corp. CEO, Masayoshi Son.
Robotics could become something insanely big in a few years!
The company believes that robotics might as well be the future of computing, so they’re investing massively in this domain. Recently, they also secured the acquisition of chip maker ARM Holdings, for a total of $24 billion.
On the other side, Alphabet is trying to rationalize some of the acquisitions made over the past years, especially those who didn’t turn out to be fitting with the wider business.
