SB Energy Files for an IPO, Revealing a $439 Billion AI Backlog

TL;DR

• SoftBank's data-center subsidiary SB Energy filed an S-1 to list on Nasdaq as SBE, disclosing $439 billion of total backlog under binding contracts, $430 billion of it from data centers, against 8.8 GW-IT of signed leases.
• Two customers account for all of it: OpenAI holds roughly 8.0 GW-IT across 17 buildings at the Ohio campus already in the AI Compute Deal Ledger, and SoftBank affiliates hold the balance, including a 50 MW-IT, $2.5 billion lease in Travis County, Texas.
• The filing doesn't move the ledger's binding total. It's logged as a snapshot, the same treatment given Applied Digital's backlog and Super Micro's order intake, because the deals inside it either already have their own row or aren't broken out by name.
• SB Energy has roughly $4 billion of debt, a $3.8 billion accumulated deficit, and not one operating data center. About $1 billion of the backlog converts to revenue in the next 24 months. Roughly $357 billion sits beyond year eight.
• Running totals: $885 billion binding on 13.34 GW, unchanged this week. Still blocked: a 380 MW FuelCell Energy fuel-cell deal that discloses generation capacity, not IT load, and the still-unconfirmed $10 billion Volta-Anthropic Norway agreement.

The Board

The number that got the headlines isn't the number that changes the ledger.

What the S-1 Actually Says

SB Energy is SoftBank's data-center and power-infrastructure company, and it just filed to go public on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SBE. Buried in the filing is a backlog figure bigger than almost anything else in this dataset: $439 billion under binding contracts, of which about $430 billion comes from data centers. That backlog sits on 8.8 GW-IT of signed leases, and the filing breaks the customer list down to exactly two names.

OpenAI holds 20-year leases covering roughly 8.0 GW-IT across 17 buildings, all at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. That's the same campus Nvidia guaranteed with a $105 billion residual-value backstop covering the initial 4.25 GW phase back in August. SoftBank affiliates hold the rest, including a smaller, more concrete example: a 50 MW-IT campus called Cosmos Technology, in Travis County, Texas, under a 15-year triple-net lease expected to bring in $2.5 billion of aggregate rent. That lease is financed by $999 million of 8.875% senior secured notes due 2031, and first rent is targeted for the fourth quarter of this year.

Do the arithmetic on Cosmos alone: $2.5 billion over 50 MW over 15 years works out to about $3.3 million per MW per year, comfortably inside the range this ledger already uses for triple-net shell leases. It's a small building next to the Ohio campus, but it's the one row in the filing with a term, a rent figure and a capacity number that all reconcile.

Why $439 Billion Doesn't Move the Ledger

I logged this as a snapshot row, sb-energy-contracted-backlog-2026-09, the same basis already used for Applied Digital's $36 billion backlog and Super Micro's order intake. Snapshots describe a company's own rollup of its business. They never get summed with anything else on the ledger. The deals inside them are either already counted elsewhere or too vague to count on their own.

Here that rule is doing real work. The $105 billion Nvidia guarantee already on the ledger and this $439 billion backlog both touch the same Ohio campus, and they are not the same instrument. Nvidia's number is a guarantee ceiling: it pays out only if OpenAI defaults. SB Energy's number is the value of the lease payments themselves. Adding them together would count the same 4.25 GW of Ohio capacity twice, once as a landlord's revenue and once as a lender's contingent exposure. So the running binding total stays exactly where it was: $885 billion on 13.34 GW, no new binding rows this week.

A Backlog With Two Customers and No Building Open Yet

The filing is also a useful reality check on how far ahead of revenue this backlog runs. SB Energy reports about $4 billion of debt and a $3.8 billion accumulated deficit, and it doesn't have a single data center operating today. Of the $439 billion backlog, roughly $1 billion converts to revenue in the next 24 months. About $357 billion sits beyond year eight.

I'm not reading that as a red flag on its own. Stargate's $500 billion program envelope and Applied Digital's $36 billion backlog both ran years ahead of delivered revenue too, and both are still on this ledger as legitimate, if front-loaded, disclosures. What I'd flag is the concentration: two customers account for the entire $430 billion data-center backlog, and one of them, OpenAI, doesn't have SB Energy's own public balance sheet to lean on if its own numbers wobble. A backlog this size, sitting on two counterparties and zero completed buildings, is exactly the kind of figure that deserves the scale check every headline gets on this site before it goes in a slug.

What's Still Blocked

FuelCell Energy and Fit Energy disclosed an agreement for up to 380 MW of fuel-cell power for AI data centers, restated in a September 2 8-K alongside FuelCell's results. Only the first 30 MW is actually committed; the other three phases are options Fit Energy can exercise or not. I'm holding it out of the ledger for a more basic reason than the optionality: the 380 MW is fuel-cell generation capacity, not the IT-load megawatts this dataset records, and there's no dollar value or IT-load-equivalent figure disclosed for the piece that is committed. It's in the candidate queue on the methodology page.

The reported $10 billion, six-year Volta Infra-Anthropic agreement at a Bitdeer-leased campus in Tydal, Norway, picked up more detail this week. New figures put it at 133 MW gross, roughly 121 MW of IT load, with two phases targeting activation at the end of this year and in March 2027. Dell is named as the technology provider. Every one of those details traces back to the same single Bloomberg report from August 4, though. Neither Volta nor Anthropic has confirmed any of it, so it stays a candidate rather than a row.

Also reviewed and passed on this week: a Corvex Inc. 8-K describing a $33 million private placement funding its own capacity build-out. The filing itself says prospective customer talks may not result in an agreement. An Exascale Labs Holdings SPAC-merger filing named no contracts at all. And Nvidia's $11.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face is a software-platform deal, not a compute capacity one.

The One-Line Read

SB Energy's S-1 finally puts a number on what OpenAI actually signed in Ohio, and the number that matters isn't the headline $439 billion, it's that two customers and zero finished buildings stand behind all of it.

Sources: SB Energy's S-1 registration statement and its Cosmos Technology Campus indenture exhibit (SEC EDGAR), cross-checked against Yahoo Finance and Latitude Media reporting on the filing, and FuelCell Energy's and Corvex's own 8-K filings for the candidates discussed above. Every figure links to its row in the full ledger, browsable per company on pages like SB Energy's entity record, OpenAI's and Nvidia's.