SB Energy Considers Waiting Until December or Later for an IPO
Phoebe Liu and Valida Pau report that SoftBank-controlled SB Energy, developer of the planned Ohio data center for OpenAI, is weighing an IPO in December or next year rather than the September target reported in August, per people familiar. AI-cloud IPOs have soured (Firmus pulled its IPO this month), and SB Energy is watching how Anthropic's expected listing trades. It filed publicly on 2 Sept (amended 21 Sept) seeking $5B to $7B. The 8.5 GW Ohio project, backed by a $105B Nvidia credit guarantee, needs over $100B of financing and comes online in phases from 2028. Bankers floated about $60B, but IPO investors balked: H1 2026 revenue was $139M, mostly from selling electricity, implying over 200x annualised revenue, while Ohio makes up most of its $430B contracted data-center revenue. It had $1.2B cash at 30 June plus a $1.5B Nvidia investment in August. Peers: Nscale sticks to a fall listing at about $30B; DayOne may delay or raise less (per Bloomberg); AirTrunk postponed a REIT listing. Caveat: SB Energy declined to comment.
Why it matters
A clear read on the AI-infrastructure IPO window, with concrete numbers (target raise, valuation talk, revenue, cash) for SB Energy, Nscale, DayOne and AirTrunk. Useful for Dealroom's IPO pipeline and for the many neocloud and data-center profiles affected by the CoreWeave and Firmus reset.
