On May 20, SB Energy Corp., a digital infrastructure company backed by SoftBank Group (SFTBY), announced that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, officially initiating its listing process. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the company emerged from a solar and energy storage developer and has since transformed into a full-stack AI infrastructure platform spanning natural gas power generation, data center construction, and operations.
SB Energy’s confidence in going public stems in part from the massive financing it completed over the past year. In January 2026, OpenAI and SoftBank Group each invested $500 million in SB Energy, injecting a total of $1 billion in equity capital and formally incorporating SB Energy into the execution framework of the “Stargate” project. Prior to this, SB Energy had already secured $800 million in redeemable preferred equity financing from the Ares Infrastructure Opportunities Fund in 2025, bringing its total funding to over $1.8 billion. According to CB Insights data, SB Energy has raised a total of $2.4 billion across four funding rounds, with investors including SoftBank, OpenAI, and Ares Management.
The partnership with OpenAI goes beyond capital. OpenAI has selected SB Energy to build and operate its 1.2-gigawatt data center campus in Milam County, Texas, with the project expected to come online in phases starting in 2026. Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and president, stated that this collaboration “combines SB Energy’s strengths in data center infrastructure and energy development with OpenAI’s deep expertise in data center engineering” to achieve “fast, reliable compute scaling.” SB Energy has also further strengthened its end-to-end capabilities from development to operations by acquiring Studio 151, a data center construction management company.
What truly places SB Energy at the core of AI infrastructure is its mega project in Piketon, Ohio. In March 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a public-private partnership with SoftBank and SB Energy to build a 10-gigawatt data center and up to 10 gigawatts of supporting power generation facilities—including at least 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas generators—at the former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, now renamed the PORTS Technology Park. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, SB Energy, in collaboration with AEP Ohio, will invest $4.2 billion in grid upgrades and new transmission lines, with an explicit commitment not to pass costs on to local residential electricity bills. The total project investment of $33.3 billion—including the natural gas power generation portion—comes from Japanese sources and falls under the Trump administration’s U.S.-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement framework.
However, this mega project is not without controversy. Around the time of the launch ceremony on March 20, 2026, some rural residents in Ohio initiated a petition to include a “ban on hyperscale data centers” in the state constitution for a public vote.
The reason SB Energy’s IPO story is worth paying attention to lies in the business model it represents, which precisely targets the biggest structural pain point in global AI infrastructure development: power supply is becoming the de facto upper limit on compute expansion. In the United States, the scale of AI compute clusters is expanding exponentially, while traditional public grid upgrades lag severely, with data center interconnection queues stretching for years. According to the International Energy Agency, global data center electricity consumption rose 17% year-over-year to 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 and is expected to double by 2030. Meanwhile, electricity costs already account for over 60% of AI data center operating expenses.
S&P downgraded SoftBank’s credit outlook in March of this year. Pushing SB Energy to go public and raise funds independently helps SoftBank inject new capital into its AI infrastructure plans without further increasing its own debt burden.
