NVIDIA (NVDA.US) is deepening its stake in SB Energy Inc., a data center infrastructure provider backed by SoftBank Group, with a planned additional investment of $1.5 billion prior to the company's US initial public offering, bringing its cumulative investment in SB Energy to $3 billion.
According to a regulatory filing submitted on Monday, NVIDIA has agreed to purchase newly issued Class N non-voting shares of SB Energy through a private placement. The subscription price per share in this transaction is set at 90% of SB Energy's final IPO offer price, representing a 10% discount to the IPO price. Upon completion of the transaction, the world's largest artificial intelligence chipmaker will have invested a total of $3 billion in SB Energy.
This investment marks the latest in a series of AI-related investments made by NVIDIA in recent times. As its AI chip business generates substantial cash flow and financial resources, the world's most valuable company is channeling capital into data centers, computing infrastructure, and other segments of the AI supply chain through equity investments and other means, aiming to foster the broader AI ecosystem's development.
For its part, SB Energy is seeking to tap the capital markets amid the global AI infrastructure buildout. As major technology companies and AI enterprises continue to expand their computing capacity deployments, the electricity, land, and infrastructure resources required for data centers have become critical bottlenecks in AI industry expansion. Companies capable of supplying large-scale data center infrastructure are consequently drawing increased attention from the capital markets.
SB Energy currently holds data center facilities totaling 8.8 gigawatts (GW) in either contracted or construction phases, including projects located in the US states of Texas and Ohio. NVIDIA's additional $1.5 billion investment ahead of SB Energy's listing underscores its bet on the sustained growth of AI data center infrastructure demand.
For NVIDIA, expanding its investment in data center infrastructure companies also carries clear industrial synergies. As AI model training and inference demand continues to rise, an increasing number of data centers coming online implies greater potential demand for GPUs and related AI computing equipment. Through investing in data centers and other AI infrastructure enterprises, NVIDIA is further strengthening its ties to the broader AI computing ecosystem.
Notably, SB Energy's investor roster also includes OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, which is itself preparing for an IPO. This means SB Energy has secured financial backing from two of the most closely watched companies in the AI supply chain—NVIDIA and OpenAI—alongside the support of SoftBank Group.
NVIDIA's latest investment comes at a time when demand for electricity and data center resources in the AI sector continues to climb. With tech giants ramping up AI capital expenditures, industry competition has extended from core chips like GPUs to encompass data centers, power supply, and other infrastructure domains. SB Energy, possessing 8.8GW of contracted or under-construction data center projects, is looking to leverage this trend to access the US capital markets. By raising its cumulative investment in the company to $3 billion prior to the IPO, NVIDIA has further solidified the ties between the two entities in the AI infrastructure space.
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