SoftBank's data centre unit tests public appetite for artificial intelligence power projects

OpenAI's postponed public listing has increased the importance of the initial public offering of SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer of power infrastructure for artificial intelligence data centres, the Financial Times reported. The company is valued at roughly $50 billion in press reports and will provide the clearest public price yet for the data centre expansion led by Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's founder and chief executive.

The filing shows how concentrated that business is. SB Energy has about 8.8 gigawatts of contracted data centre capacity that is largely unbuilt, with SoftBank and OpenAI as the anchor tenants, and it operates no data centres today. Nvidia has committed $1.5 billion in a private placement at the offering price, and OpenAI holds warrants reported at roughly $5.5 billion. The buyers of the equity are therefore also the customers and suppliers.

Private capital is not waiting for public prices. Globes reported that Vy Capital, a Dubai-based fund co-founded by Alexander Tamas and John Hering, holds about 3.4 percent of SpaceX and has seen assets under management rise from $27 billion to $50 billion since late last year, with positions in xAI, Neuralink and the Boring Company. In China, the South China Morning Post reported that a ByteDance spin-off, Anew Labs, raised $290 million as investors funded domestic rivals to Anthropic and Isomorphic Labs.

The financing structures share one feature. Returns depend on capacity that does not exist yet, contracted to a small number of related parties, at a moment when the cost of capital is rising in both Washington and Tokyo.