SoftBank to Launch U.S. AI Robotics Firm Roze, Targeting $100 Billion Valuation

SoftBank Group is preparing to spin up a U.S.-based AI and robotics company called Roze, with a plan to list it as early as this year and a target valuation of $100 billion. The company would focus on building data centers, placing Masayoshi Son’s latest wager squarely at the center of the AI infrastructure boom.

The move is more than an IPO story. It extends SoftBank’s push to turn AI infrastructure into a full-stack business, one that spans software, physical buildout and automation. In January, SoftBank Corp. announced Infrinia AI Cloud OS, a software stack designed for AI data centers. In March, it laid out a Telco AI Cloud vision aimed at transforming its telecom base into an AI infrastructure provider. In February, it said its next-generation AI data center in Hokkaido was part of a broader infrastructure push for the AI era.

SoftBank has also been scaling up the physical side of that strategy for years. In June 2024, it announced plans for a large AI data center at the Sharp Sakai Plant with a total floor area of 750,000 square meters, initial power capacity of more than 150 megawatts and a future expansion target above 400 megawatts. Then in September 2025, SoftBank said it had developed a robot-friendly server rack with a cableless structure so robots could install, remove and inspect servers. The message was clear: if data centers are becoming the factories of AI, SoftBank wants robots on the assembly line.

That is the logic behind Roze. Son has framed AI and robotics as the next frontier for the company, and the venture would also help offset the tens of billions of dollars SoftBank is committing to AI-related investments. The timing is notable because the market for AI capacity is still accelerating. Gartner estimates global data-center spending will reach $475 billion in 2025, up 42% from 2024, while McKinsey has projected that as much as $5.2 trillion in data-center investment may be needed by 2030.

The question is whether Roze solves a genuine bottleneck or simply packages the hype around AI infrastructure into a giant public offering. On one hand, labor, power and construction constraints are real, and SoftBank is already building around them with data centers, software, server racks and battery production plans. On the other, a $100 billion valuation for a newly created company would signal extraordinary investor faith in a still-unproven model. SoftBank’s mobile unit also planned in April to convert part of its Osaka factory into one of Japan’s largest large-scale battery production lines for AI data centers, underscoring how far the group is reaching to capture every layer of the buildout. Roze would sit at the intersection of that entire effort, where industrial execution and speculative appetite are becoming harder to separate.