SoftBank Launches SB Neo to Sell AI Compute to US Hyperscalers

Quick Facts

• SoftBank Corp. (51%) and SoftBank Group Corp. (49%) will incorporate SB Neo Inc. in Delaware in July 2026, with operations beginning in fiscal 2027.
• The venture targets 10 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030, anchored by a campus at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio.
• SoftBank Corp. executives say the neocloud business could triple or quadruple the telecom unit’s annual operating income to between 3 trillion and 4 trillion yen ($18.5 billion to $25 billion).

SoftBank Corp. and SoftBank Group Corp. are entering the US neocloud market. The two companies announced plans to establish SB Neo Inc., a new entity that will rent AI chip capacity to hyperscalers and large enterprises beginning in fiscal 2027, which starts in March 2027.

SB Neo will incorporate in Delaware in July 2026. SoftBank Corp. will hold a 51% stake and SoftBank Group Corp. will hold 49%, making SB Neo a consolidated subsidiary of the telecom unit.

The venture will compete directly with CoreWeave Inc. and Nebius Group NV in a market that generated over $25 billion in revenue in 2025, with year-over-year growth exceeding 200% in the back half of that year. The sector is projected to approach $400 billion by 2031.

Junichi Miyakawa, President and CEO of SoftBank Corp., called the US launch “a second founding for our company.” Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., said the group will “deploy world-class AI infrastructure and drive the AI revolution.”

The company’s infrastructure backbone is a 10-gigawatt data center campus on federal land at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio. SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy broke ground on the project in March 2026. The first phase, covering 800 megawatts, is expected to begin operations in 2028. The project includes 9.2 gigawatts of new natural gas generation developed in partnership with AEP Ohio under a public-private agreement with the US Department of Energy and Department of Commerce.

The Ohio campus is expected to create 10,000 construction jobs and more than 2,000 permanent positions. The project was announced as part of President Trump’s US-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement, which included $33.3 billion in Japanese funding for the natural gas generation component.

SB Neo will run on SoftBank’s Infrinia AI Cloud OS, a software stack developed by the company’s internal Infrinia team. The platform supports Kubernetes-as-a-Service in a multi-tenant environment and offers large language model inference via API. It runs on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 GPU systems. SoftBank Corp. has been running a beta version of the platform in Japan since May 2026.

SoftBank’s $65 billion investment in OpenAI positions the company as a natural infrastructure partner for the ChatGPT maker. SB Energy also partnered with OpenAI on the AI firm’s 1.2-gigawatt Stargate data center in Milam County, Texas.

Holger Mueller, analyst at Constellation Research, said SoftBank is entering the market at a moment of transition. “Many neocloud providers are retooling their infrastructure offerings to focus on AI inference rather than training,” Mueller said. “There’s an opportunity for SB Neo to redefine what an inference-focused neocloud for enterprises actually looks like.” Mueller added that real-time or near-real-time access to enterprise data will be the critical variable determining success.

Miyakawa said plans are also in place to build gigawatt-scale AI data centers in Japan once preparations are complete, signaling the neocloud push will extend beyond the US market.

Read more: SoftBank unveils plans to enter the US neocloud business with SB Neo