SoftBank officially announced its computing power sales business

SoftBank announced on Thursday that it will establish a U.S. cloud service company, SB Neo. It plans to start selling AI computing power from the fiscal year 2027 and gradually expand the data center capacity to about 10 gigawatts.

On Thursday afternoon Beijing time, against the backdrop of the "rumor impact" on the global computing power sector, SoftBank Group, an OpenAI shareholder and led by Japan's richest man Masayoshi Son, announced the official launch of its U.S. computing power sales business.

The announcement shows that SoftBank Group and its telecommunications subsidiary, SoftBank Corp., will jointly establish a cloud service company named "SB Neo" to be responsible for the computing power leasing business in the United States. The new company is planned to be established in the U.S. in July. SoftBank Corp. will hold 51% of the equity, and SoftBank Group will hold the remaining 49%.

(Source: Company's official website)

The "Neo" in the company's name also means "emerging cloud service provider", referring to emerging computing power service providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius that have emerged in this round of the AI wave. If we also consider SpaceX and Meta, which is considering selling computing power according to the "rumor", there are more and more companies that meet this definition - they will all compete with the traditional big three in cloud computing (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google).

SoftBank disclosed that the new company plans to start providing computing power services to the U.S. market in the fiscal year 2027 (ending in March 2028).

Junichi Miyakawa, the head of SoftBank's telecommunications business, told the media that the newly established cloud service company plans to gradually increase its computing resources and be able to provide a data center capacity of up to 10 gigawatts by around 2030.

Junichi Miyakawa also said that the new company is expected to bring "profits of a completely different order of magnitude". He said, "We regard this business we are launching in the U.S. as the second founding of our company."

The latest report on Thursday quoted "people familiar with the company's plans" as revealing that by providing computing power services in the United States, the annual operating profit of SoftBank's telecommunications subsidiary (SoftBank Corp.) could "easily triple or quadruple", reaching 3 to 4 trillion yen (equivalent to about 126.4 to 168.6 billion yuan).

As background, SoftBank Group announced in March this year that it is building a data center project with a capacity of up to 10 gigawatts in Ohio, the United States. The investment in a single park is said to be as high as 500 billion US dollars, and it will be powered by a natural gas power plant worth 33 billion US dollars. For reference, the electricity required to operate a 1-gigawatt data center can power about 750,000 households simultaneously.

(On March 20, 2026 local time, in Piketon, Ohio, the United States, SoftBank Group Chairman Masayoshi Son (middle) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (right) attended the groundbreaking ceremony of a gas power plant)

The company expects that the first-phase project of this data center will be equipped with about 800 megawatts of power supply and is expected to be completed in early 2028, with a cost between 30 and 40 billion US dollars. This schedule also aligns with the "launch in the fiscal year 2027" stated in the announcement.

For SoftBank's cloud computing business, a potential advantage is the accessibility of electricity. At the same time, since SoftBank itself is a major shareholder of OpenAI, it seems that the AI giant has no reason not to support the cloud business of its own shareholder.

Ritch Hothfield, the CEO of SoftBank's energy company, SB Energy, once said that the suppliers of the natural gas turbines required for SoftBank's Ohio project have been determined, and all equipment will be put into use by the end of this decade.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily", author: Shi Zhengcheng. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.