SoftBank built its telecom business on phone bills. Now, it wants to run on gigawatts, and it’s chasing a spot in the AI cloud market to do it.
SoftBank Group and its mobile carrier arm, SoftBank Corp., are launching a new venture called SB Neo Inc. this month, aiming to rent out AI cloud computing to US companies starting next fiscal year. Specifically, the goal, according to telecom unit head Junichi Miyakawa, is to eventually supply 10 gigawatts of data center capacity by around 2030, enough cloud infrastructure for large-scale AI training and inference work.
The numbers behind this bet are striking. Indeed, people familiar with the plan say the neocloud business could triple or quadruple SoftBank Corp.’s annual operating income, pushing it toward ¥3 trillion to ¥4 trillion, or roughly $18.5 billion to $25 billion. As a result, Miyakawa called it a shot at profit “on a different order of magnitude,” and he described the US cloud launch as something close to a second founding for the company.
That’s a big claim for a business that has spent decades selling phone plans in Japan, not cloud infrastructure. Still, it tracks with where Masayoshi Son’s attention has been for a while now. For instance, his parent company has already committed close to $65 billion to OpenAI, which gives the new cloud venture a plausible first customer.
The catch, however, is timing. Neoclouds, the term for smaller providers renting out AI-specific cloud capacity, have become a crowded field fast. CoreWeave and Nebius are already established players in this space, and meanwhile, the traditional cloud giants, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, sell the same kind of access at massive scale. Meta is reportedly working on something similar too, so SoftBank is arriving late to a cloud market that’s filling up quickly.
Where SoftBank thinks it has room to compete, though, is power. Miyakawa pointed to the company’s access to gas-fired generation as an advantage over cloud rivals scrambling to secure electricity for their facilities. After all, that’s the real bottleneck in this industry right now, more than chips or cloud software.
Meanwhile, SoftBank is already building toward a $500 billion data center project in Ohio and expanding cloud campuses in Hokkaido and Osaka, so the ambition, at least, isn’t in question.
