SoftBank bets on battery building to back bit barns

SoftBank is getting into the datacenter battery business and plans to start manufacturing them on the scale of gigawatt-hours per year of capacity to support the power needs of AI infrastructure, including its own. The Japan-based tech investment biz says it aims to deploy the battery systems it is developing at its own large-scale AI server farms initially, but plans to make them more widely available in future. It hopes to begin mass production in financial year 2027, and expects the operation to generate revenue of 100 billion (over $600 million) per year by 2030. SoftBank is working with two South Korean firms that have a track record in advanced battery-related technologies. One is Cosmos Lab, developer of zinc-halogen batteries that use pure water as an electrolyte, making them non-flammable, and the other is DeltaX, which designs and manufactures battery-based energy storage systems (BESS). Reg readers may recall that SoftBank last year bought the rights to a former Sharp LCD panel factory in Sakai City, Osaka prefecture in Japan, and said it planned to convert it into a datacenter to operate AI agents developed jointly with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The site will now become an industrial cluster, home to its battery manufacturing facility as well. SoftBank referred to it as a core hub to establish its AX Factory (a center for datacenter operations and AI infrastructure hardware manufacturing), and GX Factory (serving as a manufacturing facility for next-gen batteries, solar panels, and related products). One detail missing is how much cash the investment biz is pouring into this venture. We asked how much the project is costing to get off the ground, but a SoftBank spokesperson told us it was not able to comment. SoftBank plans to start by deploying the battery systems produced at its GX Factory in its own server halls, but will then provide them for grid applications in Japan, plus factories and other industrial uses. It hopes to take the technology into global markets over the medium term. In presentation slides seen by The Register, the firm says BESS for commercial and industrial use will have a capacity of 140 kWh to 560 kWh, while those for large-scale or grid-scale use will come in at 2,240 kWh to 5,380 kWH. According to SoftBank, DeltaX has developed BESS capable of energy densities exceeding 5 MWh in a standard commercial container format (a 20-foot shipping container). The way DeltaX packs together and connects the battery cells in its BESS maximizes their performance, Softbank claims, and by applying these technologies to next-generation battery cells (presumably referring to those of Cosmos Lab), further improvements in energy storage can be achieved. Those battery cells, which SoftBank calls Innovative batteries, use a halogen-based material for the cathode and zinc for the anode, which it says offers charge-discharge characteristics with minimal energy loss and energy efficiency comparable to existing lithium-ion batteries. As they use pure water as the electrolyte, SoftBank claims these batteries are inherently safer and won't catch fire, unlike lithium-ion batteries, which have a well-documented tendency to do exactly that. SoftBank has its finger in a number of pies when it comes to AI projects. The firm was aiming to pump $22.5 billion into LLM developer OpenAI before the end of 2025, and more recently announced plans for a massive 10 GW datacenter campus on US Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio. The company is also majority shareholder of chip designer Arm, which recently revealed its first Arm-branded datacenter processor targeting AI, and owns Ampere Computing, which makes Arm-based server chips. (R)