KDDI Commissions AI-Ready Data Center in Osaka, Marking Rapid Conversion of Former Sharp Factory

KDDI Commissions AI-Ready Data Center in Osaka, Marking Rapid Conversion of Former Sharp Factory

January 23, 2026

Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI has officially launched the first phase of its new Osaka Sakai Data Center, a significant addition to Japan's burgeoning artificial intelligence infrastructure landscape. The move underscores the intense competition and strategic investments in high-performance computing facilities across the Asia-Pacific region, driven by soaring demand for AI training and inference workloads.

The facility commenced operations on January 22, 2026, following a remarkably swift six-month conversion period. KDDI acquired the four-story, 57,000-square-meter (613,542 sq ft) former Sharp LCD manufacturing plant in Sakai, Osaka, in April 2025. The company has now repurposed the vast industrial space to house a state-of-the-art GPU cluster based on Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 hardware, utilizing a hybrid cooling system that combines air cooling with direct liquid cooling to manage the intense thermal output.

In a statement highlighting its sustainability commitment, KDDI confirmed that 100 percent of the site's energy consumption is offset by renewable power sources. The data center will primarily serve KDDI's own operations, with its computational resources being offered to external clients through the KDDI GPU Cloud service starting in April 2026. The company has already secured several early customers, including a joint venture between its group company Medical Engineering Institute Inc. and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, which plans to leverage the AI capabilities for medical data analysis and drug discovery research.

The launch signals a strategic pivot for major assets in Osaka's industrial belt. The broader Sakai Display Product Corp. site, which spans 1.27 million square meters (13.6 million sq ft), has attracted significant data center investment. Notably, SoftBank has also acquired a 440,000-square-meter portion of the same former Sharp complex, with plans to develop a data center campus with a potential capacity of up to 400MW. This clustering of AI infrastructure by leading Japanese telecom and investment firms transforms the area into a key hub for next-generation computing, supporting domestic AI development and offering high-performance resources to sectors ranging from pharmaceuticals to advanced manufacturing.

Source: datacenterdynamics