SoftBank targets 10GW as SB Neo becomes second neocloud entrant in a week

The news comes just a day after Bloomberg reported Meta Platforms was building its own capacity-resale operation, two hyperscaler-adjacent entrants into the neocloud market within 24 hours.

SB Neo will be incorporated in Delaware in July 2026, owned 51% by SoftBank Corp. and 49% by SoftBank Group Corp., and will operate as a consolidated subsidiary of the telecoms unit.

The venture plans to launch neocloud services in fiscal year 2027, ending March 2028, providing US enterprises and hyperscalers with computing resources for AI model training and inference, before scaling in phases toward a 10-gigawatt capacity target by around 2030.

The business will draw on SoftBank Group’s wider US energy and AI infrastructure buildout, including SB Energy’s data centre campus under development on Department of Energy land at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio. It will also apply lessons from SoftBank Corp.’s beta GPU cloud service running in Japan since May 2026, built on its Infrinia AI Cloud OS stack.

SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son said the group would “work together to deploy world-class AI infrastructure and drive the AI revolution,” while SoftBank Corp. president Junichi Miyakawa linked the timing to “steady progress toward securing 10 gigawatts of power” in the US.

SoftBank’s roughly $65bn cumulative investment in OpenAI gives SB Neo a plausible anchor customer once services launch. The company projects the business could triple or quadruple SoftBank Corp.’s annual operating income, to between $18.5bn and $25bn.

SB Neo joins an increasingly crowded field that already includes CoreWeave, Nebius, and the three major hyperscalers, with Meta now also circling the same market.

SoftBank launches battery business to power up AI data centres