SB Energy

SB Energy is a US data center and power platform backed by SoftBank Group and OpenAI, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It began as a solar and battery-storage developer and has since become one of the clearest examples of a company reorganizing itself around the electricity demands of AI: it now develops, builds and operates both the generation and the data centers that consume it. The company reports more than $19 billion in project capital raised, a power portfolio of roughly 5 gigawatts operating and under construction, and three AI data centers in construction.

Its defining project is the PORTS-Pike technology campus in Pike County, Ohio, built on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. SB Energy is developing roughly 10 gigawatts of new generation there — the large majority of it natural gas — to supply a data center campus that opens at just over four gigawatts and is designed to scale to eight. SB Energy owns and operates the site under a long-term lease to OpenAI, with NVIDIA as the named compute supplier and providing credit support for the land, power and buildings. A parallel agreement with the utility AEP Ohio commits billions to regional grid infrastructure and is structured to keep the buildout's cost off local ratepayers' bills — a response to the backlash that data center construction has drawn in several US states. SB Energy is also building a 1.2 gigawatt data center for OpenAI in Milam County, Texas.

Draft offering documents reported by the Wall Street Journal in August 2026 disclosed what SB Energy paid to secure OpenAI as an anchor tenant: warrants granted in January 2026 and valued at $3.6 billion at the time, worth about $5.5 billion by the end of June. OpenAI separately invested $500 million in the company and is expected to hold a single-digit stake after listing. The same documents put SB Energy's contracted backlog above $400 billion against a business that, as of August 2026, had not yet finished a single data center — the clearest illustration available of how far AI infrastructure commitments now run ahead of delivered capacity.

SB Energy filed confidentially for a US initial public offering in May 2026 and is targeting a raise of $5 billion to $7 billion, with a listing possible as early as September 2026. It is worth being precise about what the company is: SB Energy is a power and real-estate developer that AI has become the customer for, not a maker of AI software or hardware. Its relevance to AI is the electricity and the buildings, which is exactly why it is worth watching — the constraint on frontier AI has moved from chips toward megawatts, and SB Energy is one of the largest pure bets on that shift.