OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to invest $500 million in SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Energy unit, which develops renewable energy installations and data centers.
The transaction also has several other components. First, SoftBank will match OpenAI’s $500 million investment in SB Energy, doubling the value of the funding round to $1 billion. Additionally, the latter company will adopt OpenAI’s services internally and support its Stargate initiative.
The partnership is notable partly because SoftBank is the ChatGPT developer’s largest investor. In March, the Japanese tech giant agreed to lead a $40 billion funding round for the ChatGPT developer. It reportedly disbursed the last $22.5 billion tranche of the investment in late December.
SoftBank formed SB Energy in 2011 to build renewable energy infrastructure. It’s currently developing two energy storage facilities in California with a combined capacity of about 1.36 gigawatts. According to SB Energy, one of the campuses will also host a solar park with peak output of 570 megawatts.
The SoftBank unit is also active in Texas. In late 2024, it inaugurated a 900-megawatt solar park called Orion Solar Belt near Austin. The installation supports one of the data center campuses that Google LLC operates in the state.
SB Energy builds not only energy facilities but also technology infrastructure. In today’s partnership announcement, OpenAI stated that it will entrust the SoftBank unit with the construction of a 1.2-gigawatt Stargate data center. The site is located in Milam County, Texas, which is home to the Orion Solar Belt solar park.
SB Energy’s website states that it’s also building a second data center campus in Texas. The company didn’t specify whether the facility will be used by OpenAI. However, it did disclose that the site is expected to host more than 1 gigawatt worth of computing infrastructure.
OpenAI will work with SB Energy and SoftBank to develop a new approach to data center construction. The ChatGPT developer said that the methodology “brings together OpenAI’s first-party data center design with SB Energy’s proven expertise in speed, cost discipline, and integrated energy.” The collaboration is structured as a non-exclusive preferred partnership.
In addition to participating in Stargate, SB Energy will roll out ChatGPT to its employees and adopt OpenAI’s application programming interfaces. The APIs provide access to GPT-5, the model family that powers ChatGPT, along with more than a dozen other neural networks. Separately, the SoftBank unit is raising $800 million from private equity firm Ares Management to support its growth plans.
OpenAI’s SB Energy deal marks the second time it has invested in an affiliate of a company from which it has raised funding. Last month, the ChatGPT developer bought a stake in Thrive Holdings, a fund that operates professional service companies. Thrive Holdings is a unit of Thrive Capital, which invested more than $1 billion in OpenAI last year.
Photo: SB Energy
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