SoftBank's SB Energy Handed OpenAI $5.5 Billion in Stock Warrants Ahead of Planned IPO

SoftBank wants OpenAI locked into its data centers for the next two decades, and it's paying handsomely to make sure that happens.

Draft IPO filings reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and reported by AI Weekly, show SB Energy, SoftBank's AI infrastructure subsidiary, issued OpenAI stock warrants with an estimated value of $5.5 billion. The payoff for SoftBank: OpenAI signs on as anchor tenant, and stays there.

The Ohio Deal

The warrants are tied to the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, where SB Energy will build, own and operate a data center under a 20-year lease with OpenAI, according to the WSJ filings cited by AI Weekly. SB Energy announced the project in mid-August 2026 as a 10 gigawatt-scale campus, with initial capacity targeted for 2028, according to Crypto Briefing.

Nvidia is also in on the site. The chipmaker disclosed last month it is putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in financing for the Ohio campus, on the condition that only Nvidia AI compute gets deployed there, per AI Weekly's review of the filings.

SB Energy Co-CEO Rich Hossfeld told CNBC in an interview reported by Stocktwits that Nvidia won a "very competitive" bidding process for the project, with interest from "leading hyperscalers, cloud providers and frontier AI companies." Hossfeld said Nvidia's involvement helps SB Energy "unlock things like investment-grade financing" and "ensure the project is a success."

The Money Trail

This isn't SoftBank and OpenAI's first joint check into SB Energy. In January 2026, the two companies each put in $500 million, alongside a separate lease for a 1.2 gigawatt facility in Texas, according to Crypto Briefing. SB Energy's cap table also includes $800 million from Ares Infrastructure Opportunities funds last year, its third investment in the company since 2020, per AI Weekly. Total outside funding into SB Energy now stands at $2.4 billion across four rounds.

SoftBank's cumulative investment in OpenAI, across direct equity, joint SB Energy stakes, and the broader Stargate infrastructure initiative, now exceeds $64 billion, according to Crypto Briefing.

SB Energy is preparing a US listing targeting $5 billion to $7 billion in proceeds, according to both AI Weekly and Crypto Briefing. If it goes forward, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Nvidia would all have financial stakes in the very company selling shares to the public, an arrangement Crypto Briefing describes as designed so "neither side has reason to walk away" from the infrastructure buildout.

The Financing Question Wall Street Is Actually Asking

Critics of these AI-infrastructure deals keep raising a fair concern: when a chipmaker, a data-center builder, and an AI lab all hold stakes in each other and guarantee each other's financing, it gets harder to tell whether demand for AI compute is real or whether it's circular money moving between the same handful of companies. If OpenAI's warrant value depends on SB Energy's IPO succeeding, and SB Energy's financing depends on Nvidia's guarantee, and Nvidia's guarantee depends on OpenAI staying as tenant, a slowdown anywhere in that chain hits everywhere else.

BofA analyst Vivek Arya addressed a version of this concern directly, telling clients that Nvidia's valuation looks "compelling" and that much of the risk tied to the company's growing vendor-financing commitments may already be priced into the stock, according to Stocktwits. Nvidia shares fell more than 2% on August 18, 2026, their third straight losing session, amid broader market weakness, per Stocktwits, though no source ties that specific decline to the SB Energy warrant news.

None of this means the Ohio campus won't get built, or that OpenAI won't need the power it's contracting for. Compute demand from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs is real and well-documented. Anthropic filed its own IPO pitch to investors in the same stretch, according to AI Weekly, underscoring how fast the AI infrastructure financing market is moving.

What's unresolved is what SB Energy's actual IPO prospectus will disclose when it's filed with the SEC, including the exact warrant terms, strike prices, and vesting conditions that determine when and how OpenAI can cash in its $5.5 billion stake. Until that filing becomes public, the $5.5 billion figure remains an estimate drawn from draft documents, not a finalized number.