OpenAI and SoftBank are bringing SoftBank's own energy subsidiary into the Stargate infrastructure push, announcing a partnership with SB Energy to develop multi-gigawatt AI data center campuses.
SoftBank Group and OpenAI will work with SB Energy — SoftBank's renewable energy arm — to supply power for a series of AI data center campuses tied to the Stargate initiative. The anchor project is a 1.2 gigawatt facility in Texas. The arrangement is a vertical integration play: SoftBank controls both the investment capital backing Stargate and, through SB Energy, a portion of the power supply that will feed it. No construction timeline or cost breakdown was disclosed.
A 1.2 GW facility is roughly the sustained output of a mid-sized nuclear plant — not a line item to hand off to a regional utility. Keeping the power supply inside the SoftBank family reduces exposure to grid pricing and availability, two constraints that have quietly become the AI build-out's most concrete bottleneck. If Stargate's broader ambitions hold, locking in power infrastructure early looks less like synergy and more like the only way to keep the lights on.
SoftBank has made sweeping infrastructure pledges before, with results that varied from Vision Fund-era stumbles to genuine scale. Stargate is a harder-asset bet with clearer demand behind it — but a 1.2 GW campus in Texas is still a very large promise tied to an AI capacity expansion that has yet to prove it can fill what it's already building.