Mumbai : Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp is planning to invest $60 billion-$100 billion in solar power generation in India, according to a report.
SoftBank and the Indian government are expected to make an announcement soon after final arrangements and made, said Japanese public broadcaster NHK on Friday, without naming its sources.
The company is expected to make the investment through a fund backed by Saudi Arabia’s government. Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which raised over $93 billion last year. A SoftBank spokesman declined to comment. In 2015 SoftBank pledged to invest $20 billion in Indian solar projects with a goal of generating 20 gigawatts (GW) of energy as the majority partner in a joint venture with India’s Bharti Enterprises and Taiwan’s Foxconn. And in April SoftBank teamed up with China’s GCL System Integration Technology Co on a $930 million Indian solar energy venture.
India has set a target to achieve an operational solar power capacity of 100 GW by 2022, five times current levels, under Narendra Modi’s renewable energy strategy.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund has exposure to solar energy through its investment in the world’s largest such project in Saudi Arabia.
