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OpenAI and SoftBank have agreed to invest $1bn in SB Energy, an infrastructure company part-owned by the Japanese conglomerate, in a further deal to help fuel the AI start-up’s build-out of massive data centres.
The deal announced on Friday will entail OpenAI and SoftBank each investing $500mn in SB Energy, an energy group that has turned to data-centre development. The ChatGPT maker has contracted SB Energy to build a data centre in Texas as part of its $500bn Stargate project.
The deal comes a month after SoftBank completed its latest investment in OpenAI and adds to a series of interwoven transactions involving the start-up and its suppliers.
SoftBank owns a significant portion of SB Energy and has committed some $41bn in OpenAI as part of AI deals orchestrated by chief executive Masayoshi Son. SB Energy did not disclose its valuation.
Son’s conglomerate is also a major partner alongside database group Oracle in the Stargate AI infrastructure project, which will provide computing power for the chatbot ChatGPT maker.
OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman said: “Partnering with SB Energy brings together their strength in data centre infrastructure and energy development and OpenAI’s deep domain expertise in data centre engineering.”
Fears around the circularity of OpenAI’s investments have triggered jitters among investors who fear its roughly $1.5tn in infrastructure commitments far exceed revenues and rely on an ambitious growth forecast.
Chief executive Sam Altman last year touted the some 800mn weekly users of ChatGPT, but only a portion of these users pay for services.
The company has been spending significant sums to build out data centre capacity, having signed a deal with SB Energy in September for a 1.2 gigawatt data centre cluster in Milam County, Texas. The deal forms part of the 10GW of capacity the group intends to build in the US across several sites.
SoftBank established SB Energy in 2019 to deliver renewable energy projects. The group has previously built solar farms used by Google to help power several of its data centres in Texas. It has shifted in recent years to building data centres and plans to bring two gigawatt-sized facilities into service this year.
SB Energy last year received about $800mn from Los-Angeles based Ares Management, marking the private capital firm’s third investment into the group.
SoftBank has undertaken deals around data centres and acquired DigitalBridge, a US-based investor in data centres and telecom infrastructure, for about $4bn last month.