SB Energy Gave OpenAI $5.5B in Warrants Ahead of US IPO

Draft IPO documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show that SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed data-center venture preparing to go public, handed OpenAI stock warrants worth roughly $5.5 billion as the inducement to sign as anchor tenant.

OpenAI "was issued warrants worth an estimated $5.5 billion in power infrastructure firm SB Energy," per the WSJ, which reviewed draft filings tied to a planned US listing targeting $5 billion to $7 billion in proceeds.

The warrants attach OpenAI to the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, where SB Energy will "build, own and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI." Nvidia disclosed last month that it is putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in financing for the same site, on the condition that only Nvidia AI compute is deployed there.

The cap table around SB Energy has thickened fast. It "raised $800 million last year from Ares Infrastructure Opportunities funds," in what was described as Ares' third investment in the company since 2020, and took another $1 billion in January 2026 split evenly between SoftBank and OpenAI. Total funding stands at $2.4 billion across four rounds.

The disclosure is one of the most explicit examples so far of an AI lab receiving equity as inducement for a compute commitment, and it lands into a busy stretch of Stargate plumbing news across our AI infrastructure tracker. Anthropic filed its own IPO pitch to investors last week.