Tor Chang-Ran Kim
A city in western Japan plans to launch the country’s third and largest data center cluster, with a total capacity of 3.1 gigawatts, according to a document, as the Asian nation races to meet growing demand for services related to artificial intelligence.
The city of Nanto, in Toyama prefecture near the Sea of ​​Japan, plans to announce the plan with private developer GigaStream Toyama on Friday, according to the document obtained by Reuters.
The project, once completed, will be one of the largest data centers in the world and will be comparable to OpenAI’s 10 GW, $500 billion Stargate project.
Demand for data centers is skyrocketing, but establishing a third disaster-resistant Japanese center to follow those in population centers Tokyo and Osaka has proven difficult.
These two regions account for about 85% of Japan’s data centers, and the government has stated that regional diversification is crucial to alleviating bottlenecks there.
Nanto is about 250 km (155 miles) from both Tokyo and Osaka and is considered a low-risk area. Toyama is one of the prefectures with the fewest large earthquakes, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
HYPERSCALE
The first phase of the Nanto Campus would support some 400 megawatts of power capacity, equivalent to some of Japan’s largest data centers announced so far and capable of serving hyperscale operators such as Amazon 
AMZNMicrosoft 
MSFT and Google 
GOOG de Alphabet.
The center will be ready to provide service at the end of 2028, according to the public-private plan.
GigaStream Toyama, which is dedicated to preparing infrastructure for data center operators – a business model similar to that of US companies Lancium and Tract – plans to start promoting the Nanto Campus at the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in Honolulu next month, according to the document.
The company is led by Daniel Cox, a 25-year veteran of the Japanese real estate investment market.
Officials from Nanto city and GigaStream Toyama declined to comment, saying they would make an announcement shortly.
Driven by cloud and AI services, Japan’s data center market is expected to nearly double to more than 5 trillion yen ($32 billion) in the five years to 2028, according to research firm IDC Japan. The government hopes the sector will help it reach the goal of attracting 120 trillion yen in foreign direct investment by 2030, up from 53.3 trillion yen in 2024.
Unlike eastern Japan, power is more plentiful and generally cheaper in the western region, which is served by companies such as Hokuriku Electric Power 
9505Kansai Electric Power 
9503Electric Power Development (J-Power) 
9513 and other smaller operators.
Hokuriku Electric, for example, is selling less than half of its maximum potential output even without its Shika nuclear plant shut down.
(1 dollar = 155.4700 yen)
