On February 3, 2025, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended an event to promote AI for business.
Kim Kyung Hoon | Reuters
OpenAI and Softbank Announced plans to invest $1 billion in SB Energy as part of a strategic partnership to support OpenAI in building its artificial intelligence infrastructure.
This partnership includes OpenAI, SoftBank, and oracle It was announced at the White House last January, according to a release Friday. As part of the deal, SB Energy will build and operate OpenAI’s 1.2 GW data center site in Milam County, Texas, which was announced in September.
“Our partnership with SB Energy brings together SB Energy’s strengths in data center infrastructure and energy development with OpenAI’s deep expertise in data center engineering,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman said in a statement Friday. “The result is a fast and reliable way to scale computing through large, highly optimized AI data centers.”
SB Energy is backed by SoftBank and Ares Management. The company develops, owns and operates energy projects across the United States, with offices in Redwood City, California, San Diego and Denver, according to its website.
In addition to the investment, SB Energy also entered into non-exclusive preferred partnerships with OpenAI and SoftBank to develop “a new model for building data centers,” according to the release. The model combines OpenAI’s first-party data center design with SB Energy’s “proven expertise in speed, cost discipline, and integrated energy delivery,” the companies said.
The company is developing a multi-gigawatt data center campus, with initial facilities under construction and expected to be operational this year, the release said.
SoftBank, led by Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI have become increasingly intertwined over the past year.
Two months after the Stargate project was announced, OpenAI announced it had closed a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, the largest private technology funding in history. In addition to core investor Microsoft, the round also included participation from Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive.
SoftBank announced in November that it had sold its entire stake in chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion to maximize its “all-in” bet on OpenAI.
ChatGPT makers are burning through huge amounts of cash and are still far from profitability. This means that they are still heavily dependent on external capital.
OpenAI has closed more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in recent months and is trying to build data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. In November, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company was on track to generate an annual revenue run rate of more than $20 billion in 2025, with plans to grow sales to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030.
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