SB Energy's $5 Billion IPO Stalls as Investors Balk at a $50 Billion Ask

SB Energy has delayed the launch of its planned roughly $5 billion U.S. initial public offering after investors pushed back on a valuation of about $50 billion for a company with no data centers in operation yet. The SoftBank Group subsidiary publicly filed its S-1 on September 1 and had planned to start its roadshow the week of September 21 — but bankers are holding off until the valuation gap is worked through, IFR reported, quoting one banker on the offering: "The valuation gap is a big issue."

A roadshow that never launched

The timeline tells the story. SB Energy announced the public filing of its registration statement on Form S-1 on September 1, applying to list on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker "SBE," with J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Mizuho as joint lead bookrunners. Per IFR, the company had planned to launch the roadshow in the week of September 21; instead, it amended the filing that Monday, and the banks are now waiting. The amended S-1 discloses that Nvidia prepaid $1.5 billion for shares at a 10% discount to the IPO price — on top of a $1.5 billion concurrent private placement at the IPO price the chipmaker had already committed to — taking Nvidia's total backing to $3 billion. The New York Times, in reporting summarized by Briefs, says the company revised the S-1 in part to feature Nvidia Corp.'s total $3 billion investment more prominently on the cover after SEC feedback, and that the listing is not expected before mid-to-late October, with the roadshow to follow once remaining SEC questions are resolved.

SoftBank is widening the buyer base while it waits. Reuters reported on September 15 that SB Energy will sell up to $500 million in new shares to Japanese investors as part of the U.S. listing, with proceeds earmarked for general operating costs across data centers, power generation and related infrastructure. A separate UK retail offer would run through a Marex platform. The Journal has separately reported a fundraising target between $5 billion and $7 billion. The size of the U.S. offering itself has not been set.

The math investors are doing

The pushback is arithmetic. SB Energy's filing shows first-half 2026 revenue of $138.7 million against a net loss of roughly $3.2 billion — and almost none of that revenue comes from data centers, because no data centers were then operating, as CNBC reported. The revenue is legacy solar and battery storage; the data-center business the IPO is actually selling consists of about 8.8 gigawatts of contracted capacity and roughly 800 megawatts under construction, with a contracted backlog of $439 billion against first-half 2026 revenue of $138.7 million. A $50 billion valuation would be roughly 360 times first-half revenue (desk calculation).

The filing also makes the concentration explicit: SB Energy describes itself as substantially dependent on OpenAI, and OpenAI has been issued warrants worth roughly $5.5 billion, according to Reuters' reading of the investment prospectus — on top of the $500 million OpenAI invested in January alongside SoftBank's matching $500 million. Nvidia's $3 billion is the other anchor. One analysis of the filing, by AInvest, notes that only about $45 million of that loss was cash. The other roughly $3.15 billion was non-cash expense — mostly the changing estimated value of warrants held by OpenAI and other stock-based costs — which is presumably the number SoftBank's bankers will emphasize on the roadshow. But investors are being asked to price the story, not the financials.

The vertical power bet

The story is the one OpenAI and SoftBank sketched on January 9, when OpenAI and SoftBank Group each committed $500 million to SB Energy, and OpenAI selected SB Energy to build and operate the previously announced 1.2 GW Stargate data center in Milam County, Texas. As Bloomberg put it at the time: "A single gigawatt is enough to power roughly 750,000 US homes at any given moment." OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman said: "Partnering with SB Energy brings together their strength in data center infrastructure and energy development and OpenAI's deep domain expertise in data center engineering. The result is a fast, reliable way to scale compute through large, highly optimized AI data centers."

The two sides also formed a non-exclusive preferred partnership pairing OpenAI's first-party data center design with SB Energy's integrated energy delivery, and SB Energy said initial facilities were under construction with service expected to start in 2026. The $1 billion followed an $800 million redeemable preferred equity investment from Ares Infrastructure Opportunities funds in 2025. The same January Friday, Meta announced deals to secure up to 6.6 GW of energy over the next 20 years — the other side of the same trade: hyperscalers buying power, not just GPUs.

What the pause signals

SB Energy is not the only AI-adjacent listing hitting turbulence. Separately, Holtec Nuclear put its U.S. IPO on hold last week, citing market conditions. The window is open — SpaceX listed in June, Anthropic is preparing to list — but it is price-disciplined. SoftBank formed SB Energy in 2019 as a renewables play before pivoting it to AI data centers last year.

The open questions are all about price and timing: when the S-1 goes effective, when the roadshow actually launches, what price range the banks publish, the terms of the $500 million Japan sale, and whether the final valuation clears the reported $50 billion ask or comes in below it. Nvidia's $3 billion anchor and OpenAI's warrants are the demand signals to watch — the question is whether they are enough.