NTT Data Group is in final negotiations with Anthropic to build the US-based AI lab's first dedicated data center in Japan, a large-scale campus in Osaka with a planned power capacity of 500 megawatts, according to a report from Nikkei Asia published on October 13. The Japanese business daily says construction of the facility would cost around ¥1 trillion — roughly US$6.3 billion — with additional investment still required for the advanced servers and GPUs that would actually run Anthropic's models. Neither NTT Data nor Anthropic has issued an official statement about the project, and both companies declined to comment when approached by reporters.
The reported plan is the latest sign of how the race for AI compute is reshaping global infrastructure investment, with frontier labs no longer willing to depend entirely on existing cloud capacity in the United States. For readers tracking our AI industry coverage of data center deals, the Osaka project stands out because of its sheer scale: at 500 MW, it would rank among the largest data centers ever built in Japan, a country where grid-connected capacity of that size is extremely rare.
The Deal on the Table
According to Nikkei's reporting, which was quickly picked up by Reuters and other outlets, NTT Data and Anthropic are aiming to conclude negotiations by the end of NTT's fiscal year 2026, which runs through March 2027. If the agreement is finalized on that timeline, partial operation of the facility could begin as early as 2028.
The ¥1 trillion figure covers construction of the campus itself. It does not include the cost of filling it with hardware. High-end AI servers and GPUs would require a separate, and potentially much larger, investment — a pattern seen across the industry, where the building is often the cheaper half of an AI data center project.
If completed, the Osaka facility would be Anthropic's first dedicated data center in Japan. The company currently relies on cloud providers for the bulk of its compute, and a dedicated site in Japan would give it capacity physically located in one of the world's largest economies, close to Japanese enterprise customers and subject to Japanese data jurisdiction.
Why NTT Data?
NTT Data, the IT services arm of the NTT Group, is one of the few companies in Japan with the footprint to take on a project of this size. The company operates data center facilities with a combined capacity exceeding 1,600 megawatts, not only across Japan but in other Asia-Pacific markets, Latin America, and European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The company has also been expanding into AI-specific infrastructure, including facilities equipped with liquid-cooling technology — a requirement for the dense GPU racks that modern AI training and inference demand. That experience matters for an Anthropic-scale deployment, where cooling and power delivery are the two hardest engineering problems.
The Power Problem
Securing 500 megawatts through Japan's existing power grid is the project's biggest challenge, according to the Nikkei report. Grid connections of that magnitude typically take years to arrange, and Japan's grid remains constrained in the regions where data center demand is highest.
To work around this, the two companies are reportedly considering on-site power generation and fuel cells as initial alternatives or supplements to grid supply. Fuel-cell-powered data centers have drawn growing interest from AI operators worldwide, because they can be deployed faster than new grid infrastructure and can be scaled incrementally as demand grows.
Power availability has become the central constraint on AI expansion globally. Hyperscalers and AI labs have signed deals for nuclear power, gas turbines and dedicated renewable farms to feed their facilities, and Anthropic itself has previously arranged financing tied to data center buildouts in the United States. The Osaka project suggests the same playbook is now being applied to East Asia.
Japan's Growing Data Center Market
The reported deal lands in a market that is already expanding quickly. Market research firm Mordor Intelligence projects that Japan's data center market will grow from US$11.89 billion in 2026 to US$17.66 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 8.22 percent. Power capacity is expected to grow far faster — from roughly 3,570 MW to more than 11,000 MW across the 2026 to 2031 forecast period, a CAGR of 25.62 percent.
Most of that new capacity has traditionally been concentrated around Tokyo, but Osaka has emerged as Japan's second major hub, helped by its network connectivity and the availability of larger land parcels. A 500 MW facility dedicated to a single AI lab would be a step change for the city and for Japan's broader ambition to host frontier AI workloads domestically rather than importing compute from overseas clouds.
What It Means for the AI Compute Race
For Anthropic, the project would represent a significant diversification of its compute portfolio. Frontier AI companies have been racing to lock in training and inference capacity, and dedicated regional data centers reduce dependence on any single cloud partner while positioning capacity closer to enterprise customers in Asia.
For Japan, hosting Anthropic's first dedicated facility in the country would be a validation of its push to attract AI investment, following similar moves by global cloud providers expanding in the region. It would also create a high-profile test of whether Japan can deliver the power and permitting speed that AI-scale projects require.
Negotiations are reportedly still ongoing, and the final shape of the deal — including who bears the GPU costs and how power is secured — remains to be seen. AI Buzz Wire will continue to follow the story as it develops.
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