SoftBank and Meta Enter Neocloud Market, Challenging Big Three's AI Cloud Dominance

SoftBank Group is accelerating its push into AI infrastructure with a major bet on the neocloud market. According to reports from South Korean tech outlet Digital Today, both SoftBank and Meta Platforms are entering the neocloud space, a segment that directly challenges the entrenched dominance of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in AI cloud services.

Neocloud is a fast-growing segment of the cloud infrastructure industry that focuses on renting access to graphics processing units and other AI accelerators. Unlike traditional general-purpose clouds, neoclouds are laser-focused on serving AI workloads, from large model training to inference.

SoftBank has set up a dedicated subsidiary called SB Neo for this push. The company has been running a beta GPU cloud service in Japan since April 2026, powered by its Infrinia AI Cloud OS software stack. The platform supports Kubernetes-as-a-service in multi-tenant environments and inference-as-a-service capabilities for large language models.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said in a statement that the group will work together to deploy world-class AI infrastructure and drive the AI revolution. The entry comes at a strategic inflection point, as many neocloud providers are retooling their offerings from training-focused to inference-focused infrastructure.

Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, noted that there is an opportunity for SB Neo to redefine what an inference-focused neocloud for enterprises looks like. The key, he said, will be having access to enterprise data in near real-time.

SB Neo may also have a ready-made customer in OpenAI, given SoftBank's staggering $65 billion investment into the ChatGPT maker. However, the new subsidiary will face stiff competition from neocloud rivals like CoreWeave, as well as the traditional cloud giants that also sell GPU access and custom AI chips.

SoftBank Corp. head Junichi Miyakawa told the Japan Times that SB Neo's advantage lies in its ability to secure energy from gas-fired plants, a critical factor as AI data centers face mounting power constraints. The landscape is shifting rapidly, and the coming months will reveal how the big three cloud players respond to this new wave of competition.