SoftBank Group Corp. and its telecom unit are making a bold pivot into the hyper-competitive AI cloud market, announcing the formation of SB Neo Inc. — a neocloud venture that will rent AI computing resources to US companies starting next fiscal year.
The move positions SoftBank against established players like CoreWeave Inc. and Nebius Group NV in the red-hot market for AI infrastructure. The companies said in a statement Thursday that SB Neo plans to ramp up its computing resources to eventually supply data center capacity at a scale of 10 gigawatts by around 2030, targeting large-scale AI model training and inference workloads.
Junichi Miyakawa, head of SoftBank's telecom unit, outlined the ambitious scope during the announcement. The venture will offer AI chips and cloud services to big companies including hyperscalers, tapping into SoftBank's growing pipeline of data center projects.
The 10-gigawatt figure is staggering by industry standards — it represents enough power to run roughly 8 million average US homes. Most existing AI data centers operate in the hundreds-of-megawatts range, making SB Neo's target a declaration of intent to compete at the highest tier of AI compute provision.
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's founder and CEO, has long bet big on AI, famously claiming that artificial general intelligence would arrive within a decade. The neocloud unit appears to be the latest expression of that conviction, moving beyond investment (SoftBank's Vision Fund holds stakes in numerous AI companies) into direct infrastructure ownership and operation.
The neocloud model — specialized cloud providers focused exclusively on AI workloads — has exploded in the wake of GPU shortages and surging demand for training large language models. CoreWeave, originally a crypto mining operation, has emerged as the category leader after raising billions in debt and equity. Nebius Group (formerly Yandex's cloud spin-off) has also aggressively expanded into the space.
SB Neo's entry adds a major new competitor with deep pockets and global ambitions. While pricing and specific product offerings remain under wraps, the venture's scale target suggests SoftBank is playing for the long term, betting that demand for AI compute will continue its exponential growth trajectory.
The announcement comes amid growing concerns about an AI capacity glut, as Meta and other hyperscalers pour billions into infrastructure. But SoftBank appears undeterred, wagering that the AI revolution is still in its early innings.
