Bankers for the SoftBank subsidiary struggled to secure enough buyers to support the company's targeted market valuation during its initial push for a public listing. SB Energy shifted its offering from September to at least mid-to-late October after investors questioned a valuation of $50 billion or more. The company currently operates no data centers but projects a $439 billion revenue backlog over 20 years beginning in 2028, tied largely to a facility in Ohio leased to OpenAI and backed by Nvidia.

The delay follows a cooling appetite for data-center offerings, which has led to a pause by Holtec and a slowdown by Aggreko. SB Energy brought OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and infrastructure chief Sachin Katti onto an investor call last week to mitigate concerns about execution risks. The proposed Ohio site is intended to be the largest data center project in the world.