SoftBank Group and its telecommunications unit SoftBank will start a neo cloud business from the next fiscal year to rent AI computing resources to U.S. companies, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

The two companies will establish SB Neo in July as part of efforts to supply AI chips and cloud services to large companies, including hyperscalers.

Junichi Miyakawa (미야카와 준이치), head of SoftBank's telecommunications business, said the company plans to raise data centre capacity used for training and inference of large AI models to 10 gigawatts by around 2030.

SB Neo will be 51 percent owned by SoftBank and 49 percent by the parent company, the company said.

Bloomberg News, citing sources, reported that annual operating profit at SoftBank's telecommunications business could rise by as much as 3 to 4 times through the U.S. neo cloud business, potentially reaching 3 trillion to 4 trillion yen ($18.5 billion to $25 billion).

OpenAI could also become a customer of SoftBank's neo cloud business. The parent company, SoftBank Group, has pledged to invest a total of $65 billion in OpenAI by October.

SoftBank is pursuing an Ohio data centre project with 10 gigawatts of capacity. In Japan, it is building data centre complexes on the northern island of Hokkaido and in Sakai, Osaka.