SoftBank is putting together a new company called Roze AI that would deploy autonomous robots to build data centers in the United States, and it is already lining the venture up for an IPO at a desired $100B valuation. The Financial Times first reported the plan, with the Wall Street Journal adding that some SoftBank executives want the listing to happen in the second half of 2026. The pitch is to make American server-farm construction more efficient by automating the build itself.
The timing is aggressive. A $100B target would put a pre-revenue robotics-and-construction hybrid in the same valuation neighborhood as established public infrastructure names, on the strength of a thesis rather than a financial track record. SoftBank has not publicly confirmed the figures, and TechCrunch said the company did not respond to a request for more information.
Roze AI's premise is that the bottleneck in the AI buildout is no longer chips or capital but physical construction. Hyperscalers are racing to bring gigawatts of capacity online, and the labor, permitting, and assembly cycle for a single data center still runs years. If robots can compress that timeline, the value accrues twice: to the developer that finishes faster and to whoever owns the automation stack.
Key facts
- 01SoftBank is forming Roze AI to use autonomous robots to build US data centers, the Financial Times reported.
- 02The conglomerate is targeting a $100B valuation for Roze AI's IPO.
- 03Some SoftBank executives want the listing to happen in the second half of 2026.
- 04SoftBank previously sank hundreds of millions of dollars into Zume, an AI pizza startup that collapsed in 2023.
- 05Insiders have voiced skepticism 'about the valuation and the proposed timeline for an IPO,' per the FT.
The competitive frame is widening. Jeff Bezos has co-founded Project Prometheus, a startup that plans to acquire industrial firms and modernize them with AI, on a similar bet that automation can rewire heavy sectors. Roze AI takes the same idea and points it directly at the infrastructure layer feeding the AI boom.
“SoftBank wants Roze AI valued at $100B at IPO, with some executives pushing to take the robot-built data center venture public by the second half of 2026.”— Jaeden Schafer
SoftBank's appetite for the data center stack is not new. The conglomerate has been one of the most active capital sources behind OpenAI and the broader compute trade, and a robotics arm tied to physical buildouts would extend that exposure from silicon to slab. Roze AI would, in effect, let SoftBank monetize the picks-and-shovels layer twice.
The skeptics, notably, are inside the building. The FT reported that some at SoftBank have expressed doubts "about the valuation and the proposed timeline for an IPO." A second-half 2026 listing would give Roze AI only months to prove its robots can do meaningful work on a real construction site before pricing a deal.
SoftBank's track record on moonshots is mixed in ways that matter here. The firm poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Zume, an AI-driven pizza delivery startup that went out of business in 2023, and the WeWork episode is still recent enough to color how public-market investors read a SoftBank-stamped story. A $100B sticker on a company that has not yet built a data center will draw scrutiny.
There is also the question of what Roze AI actually owns. Robotic construction at data center scale spans heavy equipment, computer vision, planning software, and on-site coordination — and most of those pieces have incumbent vendors. Whether Roze is integrating those into a service or building proprietary robotic systems will determine whether the valuation thesis is software margins or contractor margins.
Demand on the customer side is real. Recent quarters have shown AWS growing 28% to $37.6B and Google Cloud clearing $20B while still calling itself capacity-constrained, both signals that hyperscalers will pay almost anything to shave months off a build. A credible automation partner has a pricing umbrella to work under.
What's still unknown is execution. SoftBank has the balance sheet to seed Roze AI and the relationships to line up early customers in the US and Japan, but robotic construction at production scale has humbled better-funded efforts. Pushing for an IPO before the robots have a portfolio of completed sites is the part insiders are reportedly worried about, and they have a point.
The broader read is that SoftBank is trying to package the AI infrastructure trade into a single public equity. If Roze AI clears the bar, it gives generalist investors a way to bet on the data center buildout without picking between Nvidia, the hyperscalers, or the power utilities. If it doesn't, it becomes the next case study in how quickly capital outruns the physical world it is trying to automate.
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