Analysis
SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed AI power and data-center infrastructure company, filed for a US initial public offering on Tuesday, disclosing in its risk factors that it is "substantially dependent" on OpenAI as both a tenant and an equity investor, CNBC reported. The filing states plainly that the concentration means SB Energy's "near-term revenues, project-level financing arrangements, and development plans are significantly linked to OpenAI's continued performance under our lease and related agreements."
SB Energy is majority-owned by Masayoshi Son's SoftBank and is applying to list under the ticker SBE on both the main Nasdaq Global Select Market and the newly launched Nasdaq Texas exchange, targeting a raise of $5 billion to $7 billion.
The company's financials show the scale of its buildout costs relative to revenue: for the first half of 2026, SB Energy posted a net loss of roughly $3.2 billion, most of it tied to its AI data-center buildout, against revenue that stayed under $150 million and came mostly from its legacy energy business.
How OpenAI became the whole story
OpenAI's relationship with SB Energy runs deeper than a typical anchor-tenant lease, Dealroom reported:
- Direct equity investment: $500 million into SB Energy
- Ohio leases: 17 leases covering roughly eight gigawatts of planned computing capacity
- Warrants: valued at about $5.5 billion, up from an initial $3.6 billion mark in January, vesting based on SB Energy's post-IPO market capitalization
That structure means OpenAI's own stake gets more valuable the better SB Energy's IPO prices -- and SB Energy's own revenue outlook depends almost entirely on OpenAI actually filling the capacity it has leased.
The circular-financing pattern repeats
This is the second major AI infrastructure deal to draw the "circular financing" label in less than 24 hours -- Anthropic's new $35 billion compute agreement with Nvidia-backed Lambda carries a similar structure, with Nvidia holding the lease on the underlying data center it's also supplying chips to. SB Energy's version runs through equity and warrants rather than a physical lease, but the underlying dynamic is the same: an AI lab's own capital and commercial commitments are propping up the valuation of the infrastructure company it depends on, making it harder for outside investors to separate genuine demand from mutually reinforcing deal-making between a small number of related parties.
SB Energy's IPO puts it in competition for AI-power capital with Crusoe Energy and Vantage Data Centers, and for OpenAI's own anchor-tenant relationships with the six-institution, $500 billion financing platform Nvidia struck with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR in August -- a reminder that SB Energy is one of several vehicles competing to be the balance sheet behind AI's physical buildout, not the only one.
That loss-to-revenue gap is wide for public-market investors to underwrite, even with a well-funded warrant holder and gigawatts of contracted capacity on the balance sheet. The company's own S-1 risk-factor language -- flagging dependence on a single customer's "continued performance" -- is not boilerplate caution here; it is close to a literal description of SB Energy's entire near-term investment case.
Whether public investors price SB Energy as an infrastructure company with a diversifying customer base or as a leveraged bet on OpenAI's own solvency will likely determine where the IPO prices inside its targeted $5-7 billion range.
