OpenAI Reportedly Acquires Approximately $5.5 Billion in Warrants from SB Energy
According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI has reportedly acquired warrants from SB Energy valued at approximately $5.5 billion. This figure refers to option-like equity rather than completed cash investments of the same amount.
The publicly disclosed equity is smaller: In January 2026, OpenAI and SoftBank Group each invested $500 million into SB Energy, totaling $1 billion, and tied SB Energy into the Stargate executive layer. OpenAI also selected the company to build and operate a data center of approximately 1.2 gigawatts in Milan County, Texas.
The PORTS-Pike project in Pike County, Ohio adds another layer to the tripartite relationship. SB Energy builds, owns, and operates the park, providing OpenAI with a lease of approximately 20 years; OpenAI leases about 8 IT gigawatts, with the park exclusively running on NVIDIA's computing stack. NVIDIA also invested $1.5 billion into SB Energy and provided credit support for the initial phase of approximately 4.25 gigawatts of land, power, and facilities, with a cap of about $105 billion.
SB Energy, controlled by SoftBank, is in talks with banks to prepare for an IPO, aiming to raise about $5 billion to $7 billion. If the $5.5 billion warrants are confirmed, its book size will be close to an IPO financing round, and the value of the warrants will fluctuate with the listing price and project implementation.
Ares previously provided SB Energy with approximately $800 million in redeemable preferred stock. The capital structure thus layers: SoftBank's control, OpenAI and NVIDIA's equity stakes, preferred stock, leases, credit support, and potential warrants, rather than a single equity transaction.
In market mechanics, the buyers are model companies that need to secure power and facilities, and accelerator manufacturers that need to secure chip sockets, while the sellers are those providing power generation, transmission, and data center shells. The event is driven by gigawatt-level leases, with funds flowing from computing capital expenditures to energy company equity and warrants; benefiting are developers who can convert leases into operational power plants and grids, while pressured are lessees who must pay rent in cash but leave upside in the warrants.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
OpenAI's approach to SB Energy is to first become a customer and then a shareholder. The $500 million investments in January serve as entry tickets for the 1.2 gigawatt order in Texas; the 8 gigawatt lease in Ohio further amplifies the order into the developer's balance sheet. If the warrants are valued at approximately $5.5 billion, it compensates for the period where cash cannot be produced today, using future listings and power plant valuations.
The capital movement is clear: SoftBank provides the holding platform, Japanese funds and U.S. Department of Energy old sites provide land and electricity, NVIDIA contributes $1.5 billion in equity plus a billion-dollar residual value guarantee for exclusive chips, while OpenAI leases and possibly warrants. The money does not grow from profits but is discounted from "twenty-year computing contracts" into "natural gas power plants and 765 kV transmission that can start today."
The benchmark is OpenAI's acquisition of up to 160 million AMD warrants at near-zero exercise prices in exchange for 6 gigawatts of procurement, as well as cloud vendors' equity arrangements for large customers. SB Energy is in a transitional phase from a SoftBank energy project company to a publicly listed AI infrastructure platform, positioning itself to securitize power bottlenecks rather than traditional independent power producer expansion.
Structurally, it belongs to capital concentration. The mechanism is: whoever can stack leases, guarantees, and warrants on the same project company can sell "gigawatts that have not yet generated power" as today's equity. Electricity is no longer just a utility bill but has become an asset that can be listed, guaranteed, and warrantized.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Leases can be discounted, and warrants can be priced.
- Locking in power is equivalent to locking in the next round of equity.
- Guarantees exchange for sockets, and warrants exchange for orders.