SoftBank and OpenAI are planning to invest ¥ 100 billion (US$ 676 million) into purchasing and transforming a now defunct factory owned by Sharp into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) ready data center. The 45 acre facility is located in Sakai, in the Osaka prefecture. This facility will be its third AI data center after the one that is operational in Tokyo and the one under construction in Hokkaido.
Readers would recall that SoftBank and OpenAI have recently established SB OpenAI Japan, a joint venture that will be 50:50 owned by OpenAI and a company established by SoftBank Group Corp. and SoftBank Corp. The purpose of this joint venture is to promote the development and marketing of ‘Cristal Intelligence,’ an advanced AI that integrates the systems and data of individual enterprises in a way that’s customized for each company.
SB OpenAI Japan plans to build data centers across Hokkaido and Osaka prefectures. It is also keen to develop homegrown Large Language Models (LLMs) specialized for the Japanese language. While the Sakai data center has been under consideration since December 2024, it was only recently that SoftBank revealed the full extent of their plans.
Speaking at the Q3 FY2024 earnings briefing earlier this year, SoftBank Corp.’s President & CEO Junichi Miyakawa explained, “First, we’ll be responsible for providing infrastructure, including land, buildings and electricity. We’ll also manage and operate the data center itself. On top of that, we’ll make investments to install GPUs so we can develop our own homegrown LLMs and provide GPU-based clouds.”
He further said that the idea was to develop the Sakai facility as an industrial hub. “The land and buildings we plan to purchase are vast, and there are areas where other facilities can be run in addition to the data centers. We want to create a testing ground where AI and existing industries come together in these places,” he said, adding, “We want to make it a place for cross-industry collaboration to address labor shortage and productivity challenges while continuing to verify new business models.”
According to a recent report by Nikkei, the factory used to be a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) manufacturing plant, and after transformation, the data center is likely to become functional by 2026. It will have an initial power capacity of 150 MW that could go up to 250 MW by 2028.