SoftBank’s SB Energy IPO filing offers 8.8 GW of contracted AI capacity, with most still unbuilt

The developer behind OpenAI's mutli-gigawatt Ohio campus is going public. SB Energy's proposed IPO gives public investors exposure to 8.8 GW-IT of contracted data-center capacity, according to its Tuesday published S-1 filing .

The SoftBank subsidiary applied to list on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under "SBE." The number of shares, price range and expected proceeds have not been disclosed.

SB Energy reports approximately $439 billion of backlog under binding contracts, including about $430 billion from data centers. Its data-center contracts have a weighted average remaining term of 19.6 years, but backlog is neither recognized revenue nor evidence that the required facilities and power infrastructure have been completed.

OpenAI has signed 20-year leases covering approximately 8.0 GW-IT across 17 buildings at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio. NVIDIA supports the initial 4.25 GW-IT phase with a guarantee valued at $105 billion in total, and the guarantee has a $105 billion remedy cap.

"Our projections assume continued expansion of both AI training workloads, which involve the computationally intensive process of developing foundation models by iterating across massive datasets, and AI inference workloads, which involve the production deployment of trained models to serve end-user queries in real time," the filing reads in its risk disclosures. The S-1 mentions OpenAI over 300 times.

NVIDIA can choose to guarantee the remaining 3.78 GW-IT, leaving that phase without the same committed credit support. The leases also concentrate the Ohio campus's contracted revenue with a single tenant: delays, disputes or deterioration in OpenAI's credit could have an outsized effect on the project. The chipmaker has also committed $3 billion to SB Energy through a $1.5 billion prepaid forward and a $1.5 billion concurrent private placement.

The campus, planned for the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, would require about 10 GW of gross power. Utility agreements covering 9.2 GW still await final regulatory approval. The first phase targets operations in 2028, with later buildings carrying 2031 and 2032 target dates.

The project expands on previously disclosed plans involving SoftBank, AEP Ohio and the Department of Energy. Those plans contemplated adding 10 GW of generation and spending $4.2 billion on transmission upgrades, with participating companies expected to fund incremental power infrastructure.