Beijing just told Masayoshi Son no, and the rejection lands on the one deal he needed to prove SoftBank's robot ambitions were more than a slide in an investor deck.
China's National Development and Reform Commission has informed SoftBank it will not approve the Japanese conglomerate's purchase of ABB's robotics division, according to a Financial Times report. The deal was signed on October 8, 2025. It valued the unit at an enterprise value of $5.375 billion and would have handed SoftBank more than 7,000 engineers, roughly 500,000 installed robots worldwide, and a client list that includes BMW. Son had called the purchase a step toward what he terms "physical AI," the idea that SoftBank's next act after chips and software is machines that actually move.
The European Commission cleared the transaction without conditions back in March. Washington's review had not concluded. China's was the one that mattered most, and it just went the other way.
China is the largest single market for industrial robotics on earth, and ABB's unit built much of its scale there. At its peak, ABB's robotics business held more than 70% of the Chinese market. That share has eroded fast: domestic manufacturers' share of China's industrial robotics market jumped from 47% to 58% in 2024 alone, according to industry data cited in coverage of the sector. ABB still runs a manufacturing hub in China with a robotics team of more than 2,000 people. Handing that footprint, and the technology behind it, to a Japanese buyer was always the part of this deal most exposed to Beijing's veto.
SoftBank is now trying to figure out what exactly went wrong and whether a revised structure could get a second look, the Financial Times reported. Neither SoftBank nor ABB has laid out a public plan for what comes next. That silence is itself a signal: there is no obvious workaround when the regulator objecting is also the gatekeeper to the buyer's largest addressable market.
SoftBank is in talks to acquire Gravis Robotics, the ETH Zurich spinout that retrofits excavators and s with AI autonomy kits. The deal would fill the last major gap in SoftBank's robotics portfolio as Masayoshi Son assembles positions across industrial automation, humanoids, and now construction. - softbank gravis robotics acquisition deal - construction robotics automation technology portfolio
A pattern, not an isolated call #
This is not Beijing's first use of regulatory process to slow a foreign tech deal this year. China has also barred state data centers from buying Nvidia chips, a move widely reported in recent weeks. It already signalled that Beijing treats chip and robotics supply chains as tools of pressure, not just commerce to be cleared or rejected on competition grounds alone. The ABB block fits the same pattern: a foreign company's asset, built up over decades inside China, now can't change hands without Beijing's sign-off. And Beijing is not required to explain its reasoning in detail.
For dealmakers, the lesson is blunt. Any cross-border acquisition touching robotics, advanced manufacturing, or industrial automation now has to treat Chinese regulatory approval as a live veto, not a formality to be checked off after the real negotiating is done. Bloomberg's own commentary on the original deal came shortly after it was announced last October. It called the sale part of a broader European retreat from robotics: ABB was shedding a business it no longer wanted to keep funding at the scale competition now demands. That retreat just got more complicated. ABB is stuck holding a division it has already decided to exit. SoftBank is stuck without the asset it needed to make its physical AI pitch credible. And the market both companies most wanted exposure to is the one standing in the way. SoftBank's shares and its broader robotics strategy, including its existing stake in Boston Dynamics, don't hinge on this one transaction. But the ABB deal was the biggest single swing at scale, and it just didn't land.
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