SoftBank is making a fresh push into the business of powering artificial intelligence.
SoftBank Group Corp. and its telecom unit have launched a new venture called SB Neo, which will offer AI chips and cloud services to large companies, according to Bloomberg. The report, by Bloomberg's Min-Jeong Lee, was highlighted by the tech-news aggregator Techmeme.
The idea is straightforward: instead of every company buying and running its own expensive AI hardware, SB Neo will rent out that computing power. According to Bloomberg, SoftBank will start renting AI computing resources to US companies in the next fiscal year.
The scale of the ambition is notable. Techmeme, citing Bloomberg, reports that SB Neo aims to provide 10 gigawatts of capacity in the United States by 2030. Capacity in the AI world is increasingly measured in gigawatts of electricity because the data centers that train and run AI models consume enormous amounts of power.
Bloomberg frames the move as SoftBank tapping into surging demand for AI services in the US market. In other words, the company sees a rush of businesses that want access to AI computing but don't want to build the infrastructure themselves.
Why it matters: AI's growth is now bottlenecked less by ideas than by access to chips, data centers, and power — and SoftBank is positioning itself to sell all three to American companies at massive scale.