Masayoshi Son Strikes Again: SoftBank Establishes SB Neo to Enter US AI Cloud Market, OpenAI May Become One of First Customers

TradingKey - On July 2, Eastern Time, SoftBank Group and its telecommunications subsidiary SoftBank Corp. jointly announced that they will establish a joint venture, SB Neo Inc., in Delaware, USA this month, officially entering the US "neocloud" market. The new company will be owned 51% by SoftBank Corp. and 49% by SoftBank Group.

SB Neo will leverage the 10-gigawatt-class energy and AI infrastructure currently being developed by SoftBank Group. It plans to officially launch neocloud services in fiscal year 2027 (ending March 2028), providing large-scale computing resources required for AI model training and inference to major US enterprises. SoftBank Corp. has been testing AI GPU cloud services in Japan since May this year, and the relevant experience will be directly applied to the US market.

Junichi Miyakawa, head of SoftBank Corp., characterized this US expansion as the company's "second founding." According to sources familiar with the matter, if the US neocloud business expands smoothly, the annual operating profit of SoftBank's telecom subsidiary is expected to grow 3 to 4 times from current levels, reaching 3 trillion to 4 trillion yen (approximately $18.5 billion to $25 billion).

A 10-GW Ambition: Backed by Ohio's $500 Billion Project

SB Neo aims to increase its data center supply capacity to 10 gigawatts (GW) by around 2030. This target is backed by the Ohio data center project announced by SoftBank in March this year, which features an investment of up to $500 billion for a single campus—ranking among the largest in the world—and will be powered by a $33 billion natural gas power plant. What does 10 GW mean? The electricity required to run a 1 GW data center can power approximately 750,000 homes simultaneously.

SB Energy, SoftBank's energy arm, has secured the natural gas turbine supplier for the Ohio project, with all equipment set to be operational by the end of this decade. The first phase of the data center will feature around 800 megawatts (MW) of power supply, with completion expected in early 2028 at a cost of $30 billion to $40 billion.

Junichi Miyakawa views power procurement as SoftBank's key differentiator. In the computing power race, a stable and sufficient power supply has become one of the core bottlenecks constraining data center expansion, and SoftBank is attempting to leverage this as a competitive barrier to enter the U.S. market.

OpenAI could become one of SB Neo's first customers

OpenAI may become one of SB Neo's first customers, as SoftBank Group has committed to investing a cumulative total of approximately $65 billion in OpenAI by October this year. This deep tie-up provides potential foundational demand support for the new cloud business.

However, competition in this space is already fierce. Specialized Neocloud providers like CoreWeave and Nebius ( NBIS) have already taken the lead in capturing the market; Amazon ( AMZN) AWS, Microsoft ( MSFT) Azure, and Google Cloud also offer AI compute leasing services. On the very same day, Meta Platforms ( META) was also reported to be planning a cloud computing business, with plans to sell its surplus AI compute capacity. Big tech companies are increasingly monetizing their idle compute capacity, reshaping the supply and demand dynamics of AI computing power.

A New Player Enters the AI Cloud Services Market

SoftBank timed the launch of SB Neo to coincide with the completion of its $10 billion additional investment in OpenAI the previous day, as well as the restarted negotiations for a $10 billion loan backed by OpenAI equity. Pieced together, these three developments outline a clear logic: SoftBank is simultaneously betting on 'investing in AI companies' and 'building AI infrastructure,' attempting to position itself strategically across the AI value chain from both the capital and asset dimensions.

However, the challenges are equally apparent. The Neocloud sector is rapidly becoming crowded, where power, land, and equipment are all scarce resources. SB Neo is not scheduled to officially go live until fiscal year 2027, while competitors are already up and running. Whether SoftBank's 10-gigawatt blueprint can be delivered on schedule will be a critical window for observing the success or failure of this Japanese giant's transformation in the coming years.