OpenAI Issued $5.5 Billion in SB Energy Warrants Ahead of SoftBank’s AI Data Center IPO
OpenAI’s financial ties to the infrastructure powering its AI ambitions just got a lot more valuable, and a lot more visible. According to a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday, citing draft IPO documents, OpenAI has been issued warrants in SB Energy, the SoftBank-owned power and data center developer, now valued at approximately $5.5 billion. The disclosure offers a rare, detailed look at how deeply intertwined OpenAI’s business has become with the companies racing to build the physical infrastructure its models depend on.
The warrants weren’t always worth that much. According to the documents, SB Energy first granted OpenAI this tranche of warrants in January 2026, when they were valued at roughly $3.6 billion. By the end of June, that figure had climbed to $5.5 billion, a jump that reflects SB Energy’s rapidly rising valuation as it prepares for its own stock market debut. The company is reportedly targeting an IPO as early as September, aiming to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion, with earlier reporting suggesting a total valuation north of $50 billion once shares start trading.
What makes this arrangement unusual is the structure behind it. SB Energy granted OpenAI the warrants specifically in exchange for OpenAI agreeing to become a tenant at its data centers, essentially compensating the AI company with equity upside rather than a straightforward customer discount. The warrants will vest in tranches tied to SB Energy hitting specific market capitalization milestones after the IPO, meaning the better SB Energy performs as a public company, the more equity value OpenAI stands to collect. It’s a structure that tightly aligns the two companies’ financial interests, turning what began as a leasing relationship into something closer to a strategic partnership with real skin in the game on both sides.
The relationship goes beyond warrants alone. OpenAI and SoftBank each invested $500 million in SB Energy back in January, part of a broader $1 billion commitment tied to the companies’ joint Stargate data center initiative. On top of the equity stake, SB Energy has also committed to purchasing at least $50 million worth of software and services from OpenAI by 2028, including access to ChatGPT Enterprise, giving OpenAI a dual role as both a customer of SB Energy’s infrastructure and, increasingly, an investor benefiting from its growth.
Nvidia has its own significant presence in the arrangement as well. Earlier this month, the chipmaker invested $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy and separately agreed to provide a guarantee of up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease a data center in Ohio that SB Energy is developing. According to the draft prospectus, Nvidia has committed a total of $3 billion to SB Energy through private transactions connected to the planned IPO. Between OpenAI, SoftBank and Nvidia, three of the biggest names in AI infrastructure now have direct financial stakes riding on SB Energy’s public listing succeeding.
That level of interdependence comes with acknowledged risk. The draft prospectus reportedly states outright that SB Energy’s business remains substantially dependent on OpenAI, a level of candor that’s somewhat unusual for a company preparing to sell shares to public investors. If OpenAI’s financial situation were to deteriorate, or if it scaled back its data center commitments, SB Energy’s own outlook could take a significant hit. That kind of concentration risk is becoming a familiar theme across the AI infrastructure buildout, where a handful of well-funded AI labs are effectively underwriting the growth of an entire ecosystem of power and data center developers.
SB Energy’s own financials reflect just how expensive this growth phase has been. The company’s net loss widened to approximately $3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, compared to a loss of only around $250 million during the same period last year. A meaningful chunk of that widening loss comes from the accounting treatment of the warrants themselves, since their rising value gets recorded as a liability on SB Energy’s books even though it represents a cost tied to landing a marquee tenant rather than a traditional operating expense. It’s a reminder that IPO-bound companies in the AI infrastructure space are often burning enormous amounts of capital well before they turn a profit, betting that scale and long-term contracts with companies like OpenAI will eventually make the math work.
SB Energy’s footprint extends across multiple data center projects, with SoftBank and OpenAI currently slated as tenants across three separate facilities. A fourth site, a 900-megawatt data center under development in Scurry County, Texas, has yet to secure a named customer, according to the draft filing, suggesting SB Energy still has meaningful capacity it needs to fill even as it heads toward its public debut. Originally founded in 2019 with a focus on solar power and energy storage projects, the company has pivoted hard toward AI-driven data center infrastructure as demand for compute capacity has outpaced almost every other growth story in the tech sector this year.
For OpenAI, this deal fits a broader pattern that’s emerged over the past year of the company using financial instruments like equity stakes and warrants to secure long-term access to computing power and energy capacity, rather than relying solely on traditional leasing agreements. As AI companies increasingly compete for a limited supply of data center space and electricity, arrangements like this one give infrastructure developers a strong incentive to prioritize AI tenants, while giving companies like OpenAI a financial upside if the underlying infrastructure business performs well. Whether that model holds up once SB Energy actually goes public, and whether investors are comfortable with a company this openly dependent on a single customer, will become clearer once the IPO documents are formally filed and shares begin trading.
