Analysis
SB Energy is considering waiting until December or later to go public, The Information reported on October 22, in what would be the second delay to the SoftBank-backed AI-infrastructure company's IPO timeline. Pulse has tracked SB Energy's IPO saga closely since its original S-1 filing.
SB Energy filed its registration statement with the SEC on September 1, 2026, targeting a Nasdaq listing, and had hoped to raise at least $5 billion at a roughly $50 billion valuation. Bankers already pushed the deal from an earlier September target toward mid-October after investors balked at that price, and the newest reporting suggests the timeline is slipping further still, toward December.
“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's comment that OpenAI itself does not plan to go public in 2026 has added to a more cautious mood around AI-infrastructure listings generally.”
The central issue, per earlier reporting on the deal, is a valuation mismatch: investors have shown interest in SB Energy at a level below the company's roughly $50 billion target, and the company has not yet brought a single data center online despite the valuation being built largely around future AI compute demand tied to OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's comment that OpenAI itself does not plan to go public in 2026 has added to a more cautious mood around AI-infrastructure listings generally.
People familiar with the matter say SB Energy still intends to proceed with a listing rather than withdraw the filing entirely. For an IPO market already parsing uneven AI-adjacent debuts, a repeatedly delayed SB Energy offering is becoming as much a signal about investor appetite for pre-revenue AI infrastructure as it is a story about one company's timeline.