(July 2): SoftBank Group Corp and its telecom unit will start renting AI computing resources to US companies next fiscal year in a bid to capitalise on the company’s growing pipeline of data centre projects.
The two companies will set up SB Neo Inc this month, ahead of plans to offer AI chips and cloud services to big companies including hyperscalers, the companies said in a statement on Thursday.
The neocloud venture plans to ramp up its computing resources to eventually supply data centre capacity at a scale of 10 gigawatts by around 2030 for large-scale AI model training and inference, according to Junichi Miyakawa, head of the telecom unit.
Supplying neocloud operations in the US could easily triple or quadruple mobile carrier operator SoftBank Corp’s annual operating income to the tune of ¥3 trillion to ¥4 trillion (US$18.5 billion (RM75 billion) to US$25 billion), according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
The new business, 51% owned by mobile carrier operator SoftBank Corp and 49% by its parent, has the potential to generate profit “on a different order of magnitude,” Miyakawa said in an interview. “We see this launch in the US as a second founding for our company.”
Japan’s third-largest mobile carrier played a foundational role for SoftBank Group, helping Masayoshi Son finance his early successes in venture capital. In recent years, the billionaire’s focus has centred around AI hardware and data centres, part of an ambition to capitalise on insatiable demand for computing power and set the stage for AI’s proliferation throughout society.
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Neoclouds — a new category of small infrastructure providers that lease out AI-focused computing power — have emerged to address soaring demand for access to computing capacity. Companies like CoreWeave Inc and Nebius Group NV are quickly renting the specialised chips their customers need to train and run AI models.
SoftBank’s neocloud operations may have a ready customer in OpenAI, in which the parent company has committed to investing a total that will reach about US$65 billion by October.
The field has grown increasingly crowded, however. In addition to dedicated neocloud service providers, industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also sell access to AI computing power. Meta Platforms Inc is also developing plans for a similar foray, Bloomberg News has reported.
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SoftBank has an edge in its ability to secure sources of power, mainly from gas-fired plants, Miyakawa said.
SoftBank envisages a US$500 billion data centre-focused project in Ohio, among the largest in the world at 10GW of capacity. At home, SoftBank’s telecom unit is building data centre campuses in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, and in Sakai, Osaka.
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