It Took $5.5 Billion in Warrants for OpenAI to Sign a Lease: SB Energy's IPO Papers Expose the Price of an Anchor Tenant

The most interesting number in AI infrastructure this week wasn’t a model benchmark or a funding round. It was a lease-signing bonus. Draft IPO documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that SB Energy — the SoftBank-backed power and data-center developer — issued OpenAI stock warrants worth an estimated $5.5 billion simply to land the ChatGPT maker as a tenant. The warrants were valued at $3.6 billion when they were granted in January. By the end of June, they had appreciated to $5.5 billion.

That is the price, in publicly documented form, of securing an AI anchor customer in 2026. And it says a great deal about where the leverage sits in the AI buildout economy.

What the documents show

The disclosure came in SB Energy’s confidential draft IPO filings, first reported by the WSJ’s Anissa Gardizy on August 31 and confirmed by Reuters. The key facts:

• Warrants, not cash. SB Energy issued OpenAI warrants — the right to buy SB Energy shares at a set price — rather than paying cash. On paper, OpenAI isn’t receiving a check; it’s receiving upside in its own landlord.
• $3.6B → $5.5B in six months. The warrant package was valued at $3.6 billion at issuance in January 2026 and $5.5 billion by end of June, according to the draft documents. The appreciation tracks SB Energy’s own expected valuation as it prepares to go public targeting more than $50 billion.
• OpenAI also invested $500 million. Alongside SoftBank Group, which committed the same amount, OpenAI put $500 million of actual equity into SB Energy in January as part of their Stargate partnership. Post-IPO, OpenAI is expected to hold a single-digit percentage stake in the company.
• The prize: a 20-year lease. What all of this bought is OpenAI’s tenancy — most prominently the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Piketon, Ohio, a former federal uranium-enrichment site that SB Energy will build, own, and operate, with OpenAI as the anchor customer under a 20-year lease spanning up to 8 gigawatts of capacity.

Context: the deal these warrants grease

The warrants didn’t emerge from nowhere. They are the connective tissue of the most elaborate financing structure in AI infrastructure today.

In January 2026, OpenAI and SoftBank each invested $500 million in SB Energy and signed a 1.2-gigawatt data-center lease for an initial Texas buildout, with SB Energy simultaneously becoming a major OpenAI API customer — a two-way commitment notable even by Stargate’s standards. In August, Nvidia stepped in with the piece that made the whole structure bankable: a guarantee of up to $105 billion in financing obligations for the Ohio campus, plus a $1.5 billion equity investment in SB Energy itself. The chipmaker effectively co-signs the project’s debt so that lenders will fund a facility whose sole purpose is housing Nvidia GPUs rented by OpenAI.

SB Energy’s IPO is the fourth leg of the table. Bloomberg and Reuters reported in May that the company hired JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and other banks for a US listing seeking a valuation north of $50 billion, hoping to raise at least $5 billion — and IFR reported in late August that Nvidia’s backstop was explicitly designed to tee up that offering. The draft documents now circulating bring the company to the cusp of that debut, possibly as soon as September.

Why this matters

The going rate for anchor tenants just became public. Data-center developers have always competed for hyperscaler leases, but the scale of inducement here is extraordinary. A $5.5 billion warrant package to win one customer — one that was already your strategic partner and equity investor — tells you how scarce bankable AI tenants are, and how desperately developers need OpenAI’s 20-year revenue commitment to raise capital. In a normal real-estate market, tenants pay landlords. In this one, landlords are handing tenants billions in equity upside for the privilege of hosting them.

It deepens the circularity question. Consider the full loop: SoftBank owns SB Energy and roughly 13% of OpenAI. OpenAI holds $5.5 billion of warrants in SB Energy plus a $500 million direct stake. Nvidia guarantees $105 billion of the project’s obligations and holds $1.5 billion of SB Energy equity. SB Energy buys Nvidia GPUs for the buildings and sells AI compute back… to OpenAI, which runs Nvidia chips. Every party is simultaneously supplier, customer, and shareholder of the others. Individually, each arrangement is defensible. Combined, they mean that if AI demand ever disappoints, losses won’t stay contained in one company’s balance sheet — they will propagate through the entire daisy chain simultaneously.

It’s a new template for AI deal-making. The warrant-for-lease structure echoes Google’s agreement with chipmaker Marvell — warrants for up to $12.2 billion in Marvell stock tied to custom-silicon supply — and Nvidia’s sprawling web of investments into neoclouds and developers. Supplier-financed AI is no longer an exception; it is becoming the default architecture of the buildout. When vendors pay customers with their own equity, everyone’s reported revenue and valuations rise together, which is precisely the pattern skeptics like Ed Zitron have flagged as the sector’s core fragility.

The retail IPO angle raises the stakes. SB Energy is expected to be one of the largest infrastructure IPOs of the year. Public-market investors will now underwrite a company whose flagship asset depends on a single tenant — OpenAI — that the company itself had to bribe with $5.5 billion of warrants to secure. If OpenAI’s compute appetite holds, that’s a virtuous cycle. If it doesn’t, warrant-lubricated leases, vendor guarantees, and cross-shareholdings will make an orderly unwind very difficult.

What to watch

• The IPO pricing. Whether SB Energy achieves its $50 billion-plus target will be the market’s verdict on the OpenAI-anchored model. A discount would signal public-market fatigue with AI circularity.
• Warrant vesting terms. The draft filings don’t fully detail what OpenAI must do to exercise — whether warrants vest on lease commitments, energy offtake, or simply time. Those terms determine how much real risk OpenAI is taking in its landlord.
• Imitators. Watch for other developers — IREN, Cloverleaf-infrastructure partners, and the Stargate site operators — to start disclosing similar tenant-inducement packages as their own financings come to market.

The AI boom’s balance sheets are increasingly written in each other’s ink. SB Energy’s draft IPO papers just made one more line of that ledger public — and it cost $5.5 billion to fill in.