OpenAI and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank have agreed to jointly invest $1 billion in SB Energy, a move aimed at accelerating the development of large-scale data centres to support artificial intelligence growth. The deal, announced on Friday, will see each company contribute $500 million to SB Energy, which has increasingly turned to data-centre construction alongside its renewable energy operations.
The ChatGPT developer has contracted SB Energy to build a new data centre in Texas as part of its $500 billion Stargate project, a multi-site initiative designed to deliver the massive computing power required for AI services. OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, described the collaboration as combining “their strength in data centre infrastructure and energy development and OpenAI’s deep domain expertise in data centre engineering.”
SoftBank, led by CEO Masayoshi Son, holds a significant stake in SB Energy and has already invested approximately $41 billion in OpenAI through a series of AI-related deals. SB Energy, established in 2019 to deliver renewable energy projects, has increasingly pivoted toward building data centres, with plans to bring two gigawatt-scale facilities online this year. The group previously constructed solar farms in Texas that power Google’s data centres and recently received around $800 million from Los Angeles-based Ares Management.
The deal comes just a month after SoftBank completed its latest investment in OpenAI and follows a series of interwoven transactions between the companies and their partners. Oracle is also involved in the Stargate AI infrastructure project, which aims to provide computing capacity for OpenAI’s services. SB Energy did not disclose its current valuation.
While the investment signals confidence in AI’s growth trajectory, some analysts have expressed caution about the circularity of OpenAI’s infrastructure commitments. The company has announced plans to build out approximately 10 gigawatts of data centre capacity in the U.S., a scale far exceeding current revenue levels and based on ambitious growth projections. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman highlighted the company’s reach last year, noting some 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT, though only a portion subscribe to paid services.
