South Korea's Korea Investment Holdings and Japan's SBI Group are drawing up plans for a joint investment fund of about 1.15 trillion yen — roughly 9.75 trillion won, or around $7 billion — to build large-scale AI data centers in Japan, according to a report by Korea's Financial News on Sunday.
The fund targets an initial 200 megawatts of data center capacity, with major companies from both countries invited to participate as investors. The two financial groups would lead the fund's formation and fundraising, while corporate investors would be courted both for their capital and for the equipment and expertise they could bring to construction and operations. According to the report, the parties aim to complete a blueprint for the project by the end of the year. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
A 'Korea-Japan Stargate'
Korean media were quick to draw comparisons to the Stargate Project, the US AI infrastructure initiative in which SoftBank leads fundraising, OpenAI leads operations, and technology companies participate as backers. The Financial News report described the proposed fund as bearing clear similarities: pooling financial capital from multiple institutions with the technology and equipment of participating companies to build AI infrastructure at scale.
The comparison is telling. Data center construction has become a capital-intensity contest, with individual projects now routinely measured in billions of dollars, and no single balance sheet — not even a large financial group's — comfortably covers the land, power, chips and construction costs involved. A dedicated fund that combines two cross-border financial groups with industrial investors is an attempt to replicate the coalition model that has made Stargate the template for hyperscale AI buildouts.
Companies in both countries, the report said, are interested in more than investment returns. They are exploring ways to broaden their participation to include supplying semiconductors, cooling systems and power equipment, as well as constructing and operating the facilities — turning the fund into a potential demand channel for Korea's chip and equipment makers and Japan's industrial suppliers alike.
That structure would mark a notable departure from conventional infrastructure investing. Rather than raising money from financial institutions and spending it with third-party vendors, the Korea-SBI plan would make the vendors themselves shareholders, aligning their returns with the project's success and giving the fund privileged access to supply chains that are currently stretched across the industry.
Political Groundwork Behind the Deal
The project did not emerge from thin air. Seiji Kihara, secretary-general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Growth Strategy Headquarters, reportedly visited South Korea from late August to early September and met Kim Nam-koo, chairman of Korea Investment Holdings, and Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics. Their discussions covered cooperation in data centers, hydrogen, blockchain and space, according to the report.
SBI Group chairman and president Yoshitaka Kitao traveled to Seoul in late September, where he met Kim to discuss cooperation including the joint fund, the report said. Consultations between the heads of the two financial groups remain ongoing as they gauge corporate interest in participating.
The initiative also rides on warming bilateral ties. At a summit in the Korean city of Andong in May, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi agreed to strengthen AI cooperation based on the two countries' respective strengths and to expand cooperation in supply chains and energy.
The sequence — political contact first, corporate visits second, fund blueprint third — suggests both governments view compute infrastructure as a strategic pillar of the relationship, not merely a commercial real estate play. For Japan, international investment in domestic data center capacity addresses a national bottleneck; for Korea, it opens an export channel for technology and equipment at a moment when AI infrastructure is one of the few reliably expanding capital markets.
Kyushu in the Frame
Several candidate locations are under consideration for the facilities, with Kyushu — Japan's southern main island — mentioned as one possibility. Parties involved in the project have contacted Kyushu Electric Power and held discussions, according to the report, a signal that power procurement, increasingly the binding constraint on AI data center construction, is already on the table.
Korea Investment Holdings is separately pursuing the establishment of an office in Japan to expand its local business and network, the report added — a further sign the securities-led financial group views the Japanese market as a long-term destination rather than a one-off bet.
What Happens Next
The parties plan to firm up the project by the end of the year as they gauge companies' willingness to invest. Neither group has disclosed a timetable for groundbreaking, named corporate investors, or specified which chip suppliers would equip the 200 megawatts of capacity.
If the blueprint is finalized on schedule, the fund would add a new, cross-border financing channel to East Asia's AI infrastructure race, at a moment when governments and companies across the region are scrambling to secure the compute capacity expected to underpin the next wave of AI services. It would also give the 'Korea-Japan Stargate' label something concrete to describe — and give both countries' industrial champions a seat at the table of the AI buildout, rather than a spot in its supply chain.
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