OpenAI’s prospective data-center landlord has given the AI company warrants valued at an estimated $5.5 billion.
SB Energy filed publicly for a Nasdaq IPO on Tuesday under the ticker SBE. The company has not disclosed the number or price of shares in the offering, although bankers have reportedly targeted proceeds of $5 billion to $7 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI holds approximately 4 million warrants, which are expected to vest in stages. About 1.73 million are set to vest and be exercised when the IPO closes, while additional portions depend on SB Energy reaching specified market-value milestones.
OpenAI is already deeply involved with the company. It invested $500 million in SB Energy earlier this year and is expected to own a single-digit percentage of its shares after the IPO. The relationship also runs in the opposite direction. SB Energy has committed to purchase at least $50 million of OpenAI software and services through 2028, including ChatGPT Enterprise, the filing shows.
OpenAI is anchoring a huge data-center buildout
The financial arrangement comes as OpenAI locks in enormous amounts of computing capacity.
In August, OpenAI signed 17 leases covering about 8 gigawatts of capacity at SB Energy’s planned southern Ohio campus. The project is backed by about 10 gigawatts of power infrastructure and has not yet been built.
SB Energy has contracts covering nearly 9 gigawatts of computing capacity overall, although it currently has no operational data centers. About 800 megawatts of capacity is under construction.
The company says its contracted data-center backlog will exceed $400 billion. Yet its current revenue comes primarily from renewable-energy projects, which generated about $140 million during the first half of 2026. Its net loss, meanwhile, widened to $3.2 billion from roughly $250 million a year earlier, largely because of changes in the estimated value of its warrant liabilities.
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Nvidia adds another layer
OpenAI is not the only major AI company financially tied to SB Energy. Nvidia has an equity stake in the company and committed $3 billion through two private transactions connected to the planned IPO. One deal gives Nvidia the right to acquire shares at a 10% discount to the offering price.
Nvidia also provided residual-value guarantees covering approximately 4.25 gigawatts of the Ohio project’s initial capacity, with an aggregate guaranteed value of as much as $105 billion, according to the Journal.
What the structure signals
The warrant package shows how the AI infrastructure boom is changing the traditional landlord-tenant model. AI companies need enormous amounts of computing capacity, while developers need customers willing to commit before billions of dollars are spent building facilities.
For OpenAI, the arrangement helps align its interests with a developer building the enormous computing infrastructure it needs. For SB Energy, having OpenAI committed to its projects gives investors a powerful demand signal before those facilities generate data-center revenue.
The arrangement also creates concentration risk. SB Energy warns that it depends substantially on OpenAI and could be materially harmed if the AI company’s financial condition deteriorates. For enterprise customers, the structure shows how the cost and availability of AI services increasingly depend on a small group of financially interconnected model developers, chipmakers and infrastructure providers.
Read more: Nvidia’s investment in SB Energy and backing for OpenAI’s Ohio data center reveal how the chipmaker is becoming increasingly involved in financing the infrastructure that uses its hardware.
