SoftBank Forms Joint Venture to Invest in Battery and Energy Storage Business

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, SoftBank Group has initiated a battery business through its telecom subsidiary SoftBank Corp., with plans to produce large battery cells and energy storage systems at a factory in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, and simultaneously expand its solar panel production capacity.

This is part of SoftBank's AI infrastructure strategy. The factory will also house a large AI data center and an AI hardware factory, and the battery business will initially be used to meet the power needs of its own AI data center.

For SoftBank, the AI infrastructure competition is expanding from computational power to power supply assurance. If power consumption in data centers continues to rise, energy storage systems will not only be auxiliary facilities but will also affect the operating costs and power supply stability of AI data centers.

The project will bring in two partners. SoftBank Corp. will develop next-generation zinc-halide batteries with South Korean battery company Cosmos Lab and advance high-performance, high-energy-density battery design with AI company DeltaX. The company expects battery production to begin in the financial year ending March 2028 and plans to enter mass production in the following financial year.

SoftBank has also set commercialization targets for this new business. The company hopes that by the fiscal year 2030, the annual revenue from the battery business will exceed 100 billion yen, approximately USD 638 million, and it plans to expand the application range from its own AI data centers to Japan's power grid and industrial scenarios, with a possibility of entering overseas markets in the medium term.

This investment continues SoftBank's direction towards AI supply chains. The company is establishing Roze AI, which focuses on AI infrastructure and robotics. It has previously been involved in the Stargate AI infrastructure project related to OpenAI and has invested up to USD 35 billion in OpenAI.