SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers — and is already eyeing a $100 billion IPO

Technology companies are racing to build the infrastructure that can power the automation boom. Now, Japanese multinational SoftBank is reportedly planning to create a new company designed to automate the construction of that infrastructure.

SoftBank is establishing a new company called Roze AI, the Financial Times originally reported. Rose will seek to make building data centers in the United States more “efficient,” the Wall Street Journal reports. It will do this by – among other things – deploying autonomous robots to help build server farms.

In an interesting development, the group is already preparing Roze for an IPO, and some executives want that to happen by the second half of 2026, the newspaper wrote. The Financial Times reported that the required valuation could be $100 billion.

TechCrunch has reached out to SoftBank for more information.

Other recent projects have also envisioned using artificial intelligence and automation to make the industrial sector more efficient. For example, Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos co-founded a startup called Project Prometheus, which plans to buy companies in major industrial sectors and modernize them with artificial intelligence.

SoftBank has been known to back some dark-horse startups (notably, it pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Zume, an AI-driven pizza delivery startup that went bankrupt in 2023). The Financial Times notes that some inside SoftBank have expressed doubts “about the valuation and proposed timeline for the IPO.”