SoftBank forms SB Neo to rent 10GW of US AI compute by 2030
SoftBank is forming SB Neo — 51% telecom unit, 49% group — to rent AI chips and cloud to US hyperscalers and large enterprises starting next fiscal year, ramping to 10 gigawatts of capacity by around 2030. That puts SoftBank directly against neocloud incumbents CoreWeave and Nebius, with SB Energy anchoring the buildout on US Department of Energy land at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio.
Source: japantimes.co.jp ↗
The "neocloud," or AI-tailored-cloud, venture plans to ramp up its computing resources to eventually supply data center capacity at a scale of 10 gigawatts by around 2030 for large-scale AI model training and inference.
SoftBank Group statement / Junichi Miyakawa, telecom unit head
Why this matters
- → SoftBank enters $100B+ AI compute rental market against entrenched competitors.
- → 10GW capacity by 2030 signals major shift in cloud infrastructure competition.
- → US energy infrastructure now critical battleground for AI chip access.
SoftBank's AI compute play