How Can a Company With No Data Centers Have a $439 Billion Backlog?
SB Energy does not currently operate a data center.
Yet it has reported a backlog of roughly $439 billion.
That number is so large that it sounds almost impossible.
For comparison, the company generated only about $139 million in revenue during the first half of 2026.
And yet SB Energy is now preparing for an IPO that could value the company at more than $50 billion.
So what exactly is happening?
The answer starts with a word that appears constantly in corporate earnings reports:
backlog.
And backlog is not the same thing as revenue.
$439 Billion Is Not $439 Billion of Cash
When a company reports backlog, it is usually describing contracted business that it expects to recognize as revenue in the future.
The money has not necessarily arrived.
The work may not be complete.
In some cases, the physical infrastructure required to generate that revenue may not even exist yet.
That is exactly what makes SB Energy unusual.
Almost all of its massive new backlog comes from planned data centers.
According to company filings and Reuters analysis, roughly $430 billion of the total backlog is tied to data-center contracts.
But most of those facilities have not yet been built.
Reuters Breakingviews estimated that only about 10% of the data-center backlog is expected to become revenue within the next six years.
The rest stretches much further into the future.
That sounds less mysterious once you understand how the contracts work.
A 20-Year Lease Can Create a Very Big Number
Imagine you own an empty piece of land.
A company agrees to rent a building from you for 20 years.
The building does not exist yet.
But the tenant has already committed to using it once you build it.
If the annual payments are large enough, adding up 20 years of expected payments produces an enormous number.
That is broadly what is happening here.
SB Energy is developing massive AI data-center campuses where customers commit to long-term capacity.
One major project is the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio.
OpenAI is expected to be a tenant.
SB Energy plans to build, own and operate the data-center infrastructure.
The initial arrangements involve roughly 4.25 gigawatts of IT load, with the potential for about 3.8 additional gigawatts.
The planned leases can run for around 20 years.
Multiply large annual payments by enormous capacity and very long contract periods, and the backlog number gets big very quickly.
But there is still a major problem.
Someone has to pay for the buildings first.
Contracts Help Turn Empty Land Into Financeable Infrastructure
Data centers are expensive.
AI data centers are especially expensive.
They require land.
Power.
Cooling.
Buildings.
Electrical equipment.
Networking.
And eventually huge amounts of computing hardware.
SB Energy therefore cannot simply point to a future customer and start building billions of dollars of infrastructure with its own cash.
It needs financing.
And lenders want to know one thing:
Who is going to pay for this when it is finished?
This is where a long-term lease becomes more than a customer agreement.
It can become part of the financing structure.
If a credible customer agrees to use the facility for many years, lenders may be more willing to finance construction.
In other words:
contract → financing → construction → operating data center → revenue
The contract comes first.
The data center comes later.
That is why a company can have hundreds of billions of dollars of backlog before operating the infrastructure expected to generate it.
Then Nvidia Enters the Story
This is where the structure gets even more unusual.
Nvidia is not simply selling GPUs into the project.
According to Nvidia's own SEC filing, the company is also providing credit support connected to the first phase of the PORTS-Pike development.
The arrangements include residual-value guarantees associated with approximately 4.25 gigawatts of planned capacity.
The maximum aggregate obligation under those guarantees can reach as much as $105 billion.
That does not mean Nvidia is handing SB Energy $105 billion today.
It is a conditional guarantee structure.
The obligations become relevant only under specified circumstances and as data-center capacity reaches certain readiness conditions.
OpenAI has also agreed to reimburse Nvidia for certain amounts Nvidia could be required to pay.
So the actual structure looks less like a normal supplier relationship and more like a financial ecosystem.
Nvidia supplies technology.
Nvidia invests.
Nvidia helps support financing.
OpenAI becomes the customer.
SB Energy builds the infrastructure.
Each party helps make the others' business possible.
OpenAI Is More Than a Customer Too
OpenAI is also not behaving like a normal tenant.
It has invested in SB Energy and received warrants tied to the company.
Those warrants were reported to have been valued at roughly $5.5 billion.
That creates an unusual relationship.
OpenAI could benefit if SB Energy becomes more valuable.
SB Energy benefits from having OpenAI as a massive customer.
OpenAI needs the infrastructure SB Energy is building.
And Nvidia benefits if those data centers become enormous buyers of Nvidia hardware.
The customer, supplier, investor and financing roles start to overlap.
This is becoming increasingly common across the AI infrastructure boom.
Companies are not simply buying from each other.
They are helping finance each other's growth.
That Makes the Backlog More Complicated
A backlog number can look reassuring because it represents future contracted business.
But backlog is only as strong as the structure underneath it.
SB Energy's contracted data-center capacity is heavily concentrated among OpenAI and SoftBank-related customers.
That creates customer concentration risk.
If one giant customer changes its expansion plans, the effect can be much larger than it would be for a business serving thousands of unrelated customers.
There is also construction risk.
Power connections can be delayed.
Permits can take longer than expected.
Costs can rise.
Financing can become more expensive.
Technology requirements can change.
A 20-year contract may produce a huge backlog number.
But the company still has to build the infrastructure that turns the contract into revenue.
That distinction is the entire story.
The $3.2 Billion Loss Is Also Not What It First Looks Like
SB Energy reported a net loss of roughly $3.2 billion in the first half of 2026.
Next to $139 million of revenue, that looks astonishing.
But reading the number literally can be misleading.
A significant part of the accounting loss is tied to changes in the value of financial instruments, including warrants.
Those accounting adjustments can produce very large paper gains or losses without representing the same thing as cash being spent on normal operations.
So it would be wrong to say SB Energy simply "burned $3.2 billion" running the business.
The loss matters.
But its composition matters too.
This is another reason enormous numbers in fast-growing infrastructure companies need to be unpacked before they are interpreted.
Why Would Anyone Value This Company at $50 Billion?
The obvious response is:
How can a company with $139 million of half-year revenue be worth more than $50 billion?
But that question assumes investors are valuing only the current business.
They are not.
A potential investor is looking at several things at once.
Existing energy operations.
Land.
Power access.
Interconnection rights.
Development expertise.
Long-term data-center contracts.
Relationships with OpenAI and SoftBank.
Nvidia support.
And the possibility that enormous amounts of AI infrastructure will be built on top of those assets.
In other words, the market is not being asked to value what SB Energy is today.
It is being asked to value what its contracts could allow it to become.
That is a much more speculative calculation.
But it is not an irrational one by definition.
CoreWeave Shows Why The Market Thinks This Way
There is already a precedent.
CoreWeave grew rapidly by securing huge commitments for AI computing capacity.
Its backlog became a major part of how investors evaluated the business.
But there is an important difference.
CoreWeave already operates substantial computing infrastructure and generates billions of dollars in revenue.
SB Energy is much earlier in the cycle.
Its sequence is closer to:
contract first
then
financing
then
construction
then
revenue
That makes the future worth potentially enormous.
It also makes the execution risk enormous.
This Is Bigger Than SB Energy
The most interesting part of this story is not whether SB Energy eventually deserves a $50 billion valuation.
It is what the company reveals about the AI infrastructure boom.
The industry is becoming so capital intensive that the order of business has changed.
Companies cannot always build first and find customers later.
The projects are too large.
Instead, they often need a major customer first.
Then a long-term contract.
Then credit support.
Then financing.
Then construction.
Only after all of that does the actual data center begin producing revenue.
That means a contract for something that does not yet exist can become one of the most valuable assets a company owns.
The Data Center May Be The Last Thing To Arrive
When people think about AI infrastructure, they usually picture the finished objects.
GPU racks.
Cooling systems.
Power plants.
Massive data centers.
But financially, the project begins much earlier.
It can begin with a customer promising to use capacity years into the future.
That promise can support financing.
The financing can support construction.
The construction creates the data center.
And the data center eventually creates revenue.
SB Energy's $439 billion backlog is therefore not $439 billion sitting in a bank account.
It is something more unusual.
It is a giant financial claim on a future that still has to be built.
SB Energy's most valuable asset today may not be a data center.
It may be the contracts powerful enough to finance the data centers that do not exist yet.
BEYOND THE OBVIOUS.
Sources
Reuters — SB Energy Moves Closer to Public Markets With U.S. IPO Filing
Reuters Breakingviews — SB Energy's Giant IPO Is Getting Ahead of Itself
Nvidia SEC Filing — PORTS-Pike Credit Support Agreement
Nvidia — SB Energy, OpenAI and Nvidia PORTS-Pike Announcement
Nvidia — Q2 FY2027 CFO Commentary