OpenAI has secured warrants worth approximately USD 5.5 billion in SB Energy, a power infrastructure firm and SoftBank subsidiary, as part of a broad push to lock in dedicated data center capacity for artificial intelligence workloads.

The deal, reported by the Wall Street Journal, represents one of the largest infrastructure-linked financial arrangements tied directly to AI compute expansion.

The Structure of the Deal

OpenAI's warrants in SB Energy give it a financial stake in the infrastructure firm at a time when purpose-built AI data centers are becoming an increasingly urgent priority for leading AI developers.

Warrants of this scale reflect how central energy and compute infrastructure have become to the business strategies of companies at the frontier of AI development.

The arrangement does not stand alone. Nvidia has separately invested USD 1.5 billion directly into SB Energy.

Beyond that equity investment, Nvidia has agreed to provide a guarantee of up to USD 105 billion to facilitate OpenAI's lease of a data center in Ohio currently being developed by SB Energy.

That guarantee figure alone signals the extraordinary capital commitments now being made to secure AI-ready infrastructure at scale.

SB Energy's Role in AI Infrastructure

SB Energy, operating as a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, is focused on developing large-scale power and data center infrastructure projects.

The company is actively building several data center campuses specifically designed to support high-density AI workloads, which place far greater demands on power capacity and cooling than conventional enterprise computing.

As part of the broader arrangement, both SoftBank Group and OpenAI are designated as tenants in three new data centers being developed by SB Energy.

This tenant structure means that the major backers of the infrastructure projects are also among its primary intended users, creating a vertically integrated approach to AI compute capacity.

A Convergence of AI's Biggest Players

The clustering of OpenAI, Nvidia, and SoftBank around SB Energy illustrates a wider pattern forming across the AI industry, where chipmakers, model developers, and infrastructure providers are moving into closer financial and operational alignment.

Nvidia's dual role, as an equity investor in SB Energy and as a guarantor for OpenAI's Ohio data center lease, is particularly notable, as it positions the chip company not merely as a hardware supplier but as an active participant in shaping the infrastructure stack on which AI systems will run.

The Ohio facility being developed by SB Energy is one concrete example of where these investments are materializing.

With Nvidia's USD 105 billion lease guarantee underpinning the arrangement, the project represents a significant commitment to building out AI data center capacity in the United States.

SB Energy's Valuation and Market Ambitions

These investments are taking place against the backdrop of SB Energy's reported pursuit of a public market debut. According to Reuters sources cited earlier this year, SB Energy is seeking a valuation exceeding USD 50 billion in a potential listing that could occur as early as next month.

That target valuation reflects the degree to which investor appetite has grown for companies positioned at the intersection of energy infrastructure and AI expansion.

A valuation at that level would make SB Energy one of the more significant infrastructure listings in recent memory, driven largely by expectations that demand for AI data center capacity will continue to escalate as models grow more complex and compute-intensive.

Capital Requirements of AI at Scale

The scale of the financial commitments involved in these deals underscores just how capital-intensive the buildout of next-generation AI infrastructure has become.

The USD 5.5 billion in warrants secured by OpenAI, combined with Nvidia's USD 1.5 billion equity investment and its USD 105 billion lease guarantee, represents a combined figure that dwarfs what was being spent on comparable infrastructure just a few years ago.

Purpose-built data centers for AI differ substantially from conventional facilities in their power density requirements, cooling demands, and the speed at which they need to be brought online to meet the pace of model development.

SB Energy's focus on large-scale power and data center infrastructure projects is specifically oriented toward meeting those requirements.

The three data centers for which SoftBank Group and OpenAI are designated tenants are being developed with those demands in mind, representing SB Energy's most direct operational link to the AI companies whose growth is driving infrastructure investment across the sector.