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Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index closed above 67,000 for the first time in history on June 1, 2026, finishing the midday session at 67,038.24. That’s a 1.1% gain, or 709 points added in a single day. The catalyst: a ferocious rally in artificial intelligence stocks, led by a company that’s been betting its entire future on the technology.
SoftBank Group’s shares surged 10.3% intraday, single-handedly contributing 618 of those 709 points to the index’s advance. In other words, one company was responsible for roughly 87% of the Nikkei’s record-setting move.
SoftBank dethrones Toyota after 23 years
The rally pushed SoftBank’s market capitalization to ¥47.2 trillion, leapfrogging Toyota Motor’s ¥45.7 trillion. It’s the first time SoftBank has held the title of Japan’s most valuable listed company since 2000, back when the dot-com bubble was still making everything look like genius.
Toyota, a manufacturing colossus that produces roughly 10 million vehicles per year and employs hundreds of thousands of workers globally, was overtaken by a holding company whose most valuable assets are stakes in other companies. SoftBank’s crown jewels include significant positions in Arm Holdings, the chip design firm whose architecture powers most of the world’s smartphones, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
The AI trade goes broad in Tokyo
SoftBank wasn’t the only beneficiary. The broader IT sector on the Nikkei climbed 4.3%, with retail investors piling into semiconductor-adjacent names. Murata Manufacturing, which produces electronic components used in everything from smartphones to AI servers, gained as much as 14.1% during the session.
The index itself hit an intraday record of 67,231.28 before settling slightly lower at the close. SoftBank recently committed €75 billion to AI infrastructure projects in France alone, a staggering sum that positions the company as one of the largest private investors in AI computing globally.
What this means for investors
The concentration risk in this rally deserves attention. When a single stock accounts for 87% of an index’s daily gain, the sustainability of the move depends almost entirely on that one company continuing to deliver. SoftBank has a famously volatile track record. Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund lost tens of billions during the 2022 tech downturn before staging a dramatic recovery.
Toyota generates enormous free cash flow from actual car sales. SoftBank’s value is derived from stakes in companies that are, in many cases, still burning cash to build out AI capabilities.
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