SB Energy Prepares $50 Billion IPO Amid AI Power Demand Boom

SB Energy, a company building power plants and data centers for artificial intelligence needs, filed on September 1 for an initial public offering on a U.S. stock exchange. The SoftBank-backed company aims to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion at a valuation exceeding $50 billion, with Nvidia and OpenAI already participating in the offering.

What Was Filed With the SEC

SB Energy Corp., headquartered in Redwood City, California, filed its registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The banks leading the offering are JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Mizuho. The company plans to debut under the ticker SBE simultaneously on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and the newly created Nasdaq Texas exchange.

SB Energy's business model combines power generation, including natural gas, solar and battery storage, with the construction of gigawatt-scale data center campuses powered directly by those sources. The company already has 9.2 gigawatts of capacity from a gas-fired power plant in Ohio and a 1.2-gigawatt data center in Texas being built specifically for OpenAI.

Nvidia and OpenAI Anchor the Offering

Nvidia has committed to investing a total of $3 billion, split between a private placement of shares closing alongside the IPO and a prepaid forward contract. The chipmaker is also supplying chips to the Ohio campus, tying the investment to actual hardware infrastructure.

OpenAI appears in the offering in a dual role, as both investor and primary tenant. Sam Altman's company signed 20-year lease agreements across three SB Energy campuses, and the prospectus states outright that the company is "materially dependent" on OpenAI as a customer. In exchange, OpenAI received warrants valued at roughly $5.5 billion, alongside a direct $500 million investment.

OpenAI's twenty-year leases provide certainty from a contractual standpoint, but they stretch over an extremely long horizon for an industry that changes this fast - Lukas Muehlbauer, IPOX analyst

Losses, Backlog and Concentration Risk

The financial figures show the scale and the risk of the venture at once. Revenue in the first half of 2026 rose to $138.7 million from $83.3 million a year earlier, but the net loss jumped to $3.21 billion compared with $215.5 million a year earlier, driven mainly by non-cash revaluation of financial instruments tied to the warrants. The company reports a backlog of roughly $439 billion, reflecting multi-year contracts for power supply and data center capacity.

Bloomberg analysts note that SB Energy's listing helps ease doubts about the valuation of SoftBank's assets and its ability to fund its own AI investment program, since subsidiaries can raise capital independently, easing the burden on the parent company's balance sheet.

What It Means for Poland

For Polish readers, this deal is further proof that the race for AI infrastructure is shifting from chips alone to energy. UBS analysts estimate that closing the global power gap needed for data centers by 2030 will require $511 billion in spending. In Poland, Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne (the national power grid operator) already warns that data centers could consume as much as one-tenth of the country's electricity by 2040, and rising energy and equipment prices driven by the global AI investment boom are also being felt by domestic energy and industrial companies.

SB Energy is one of the first infrastructure companies serving AI needs exclusively to test stock market investors' appetite for this type of asset, following a series of enormous private funding rounds in the sector. The success or failure of this offering will send a signal to other data center energy developers, including in Europe, about how the market prices risk concentrated around a single dominant tenant, in this case OpenAI.

No date has been set yet for the actual stock market debut; typically anywhere from a few weeks to a few months pass between filing the prospectus and the first listing. The key question will be whether investors accept a valuation above $50 billion for a company that does not yet have a single operational data center, and whose financial results are weighed down by billions of dollars in losses, though mostly on paper.