Another $1.5 billion was spent before the IPO! Nvidia (NVDA.US) increased investment in SB Energy to reach a cumulative scale of 3 billion US dollars

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Nvidia (NVDA.US) will further increase the SoftBank Group-supported data center infrastructure provider before SB Energy Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO) in the US, and plans to invest an additional 1.5 billion US dollars, bringing its cumulative investment in SB Energy to 3 billion US dollars.

According to regulatory documents submitted on Monday, Nvidia has agreed to purchase SB Energy's newly issued Class N non-voting shares through private placement. The subscription price per share in this transaction is equivalent to 90% of SB Energy's final IPO issuance price, or 10% off the IPO price.

After the transaction is completed, Nvidia's cumulative investment in SB Energy, as the world's largest manufacturer of artificial intelligence chips, will reach $3 billion. This investment is also the latest in a series of recent investments by Nvidia in the AI industry. As the AI chip business brings huge cash flow and financial resources, the company with the highest market capitalization in the world is further investing capital in data centers, computing power infrastructure, and other AI industry chain links through equity investment to promote the development of a wider AI ecosystem.

SB Energy, on the other hand, hopes to use the global AI infrastructure construction boom to enter the capital market. As large technology companies and AI companies continue to expand their computing power deployment, the electricity, land, and infrastructure resources required for data centers have become an important bottleneck in the expansion of the AI industry, and companies that can provide large-scale data center infrastructure are also receiving attention from the capital market as a result.

Currently, SB Energy has a total of 8.8 gigawatts (GW) of data center facilities under contract or construction, including projects in Texas and Ohio in the US.

Nvidia's investment of a further $1.5 billion before SB Energy's listing also highlights its bet on the continued growth in demand for AI data center infrastructure. For Nvidia, expanding investment in data center infrastructure companies also has a clear industrial agreement meaning. As demand for AI model training and inference continues to increase, putting more data centers into operation means that the potential demand for GPUs and related AI computing devices expands further. Therefore, by investing in data centers and other AI infrastructure companies, Nvidia is also further strengthening its links with the entire AI computing power ecosystem.

Notably, investors behind SB Energy also include ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which is also preparing an IPO itself. This means that SB Energy has now received financial support from the two most popular companies in the AI industry chain, Nvidia and OpenAI, and is also backed by SoftBank Group.

Nvidia's additional investment comes at a time when the AI industry's demand for power and data center resources continues to rise. As tech giants continue to increase AI capital expenditure, industrial competition has gradually extended from core chips such as GPUs to data centers, power supply, and other infrastructure fields.

SB Energy, which has 8.8 GW of contracted or under construction data center projects, is trying to capitalize on this trend to enter the US capital market. Meanwhile, Nvidia raised its cumulative investment in the company to 3 billion US dollars before the IPO, further strengthening the ties between the two sides in the field of AI infrastructure.