NTT Data in Final Talks for 500MW, $6.3B Anthropic Data Center in Osaka

NTT Data Group is in the final stages of talks to build a data center in Osaka for Anthropic, Nikkei reported Tuesday. Construction could cost up to 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion), and the site would draw Official NTT rendering of its large-scale Kansai data center campus development in western Japan.as much as 500 MW of power, among the largest intakes of any facility in the country.

The deal

The two companies aim to sign an agreement by March 31, 2027, the close of Japan's fiscal year, with partial operations starting as early as 2028, according to the report. It would be Anthropic's first dedicated data center in Japan. Reuters corroborated the account, citing the multiple sources referenced by Nikkei, and noted that NTT declined to comment. Construction alone accounts for the 1 trillion yen figure; once Anthropic fills the halls with GPU servers, the total bill could climb to several trillion yen, according to The Next Web.

Neither company has publicly confirmed the talks.

Power comes first

Power is the constraint. Drawing 500 MW from the grid would be slow, so the project will first examine generating electricity on site and using fuel cells, Nikkei reported.

The project lands amid a national build-out. Tokyo has set a target of 32.7 trillion yen in combined public and private investment in data centers, cloud computing and battery storage by 2035. Other large sites are planned in Akita and Kagoshima prefectures, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala has weighed spending as much as 1 trillion yen on an AI data center in Akita, the Japan Times reported in August.

NTT's home market

For NTT, an Anthropic anchor would cap a rapid domestic expansion. The company opened the 30 MW Keihanna OSK11 in April, its fourteenth data center in Japan, and is building the 36 MW Osaka North 1 (OSK12) campus in Ibaraki City, where an 18 MW first building is due in 2028. NTT Data plans to spend at least $9 billion through 2033 to lift domestic capacity from roughly 300 MW to about 1 GW, Bloomberg reported in August. "Computational demand is expected to grow in tandem with the size of the economy," said Yasuo Suzuki, who headed NTT Data's Asia Pacific data center operations through July.

Baxtel tracks 75 facilities in Osaka, the second-largest data center market in Japan behind Tokyo, and NTT is the largest operator there with eight sites. The biggest facility in the market today, Colt Osaka Keihanna, carries 46 MW. Twelve projects are under construction, including the 24 MW KIX15 that Digital Realty started last week. Worldwide, Baxtel lists 152 NTT sites.

Anthropic's build-out

Anthropic has been stitching together dedicated capacity across the US and is now extending the model overseas. Baxtel lists its 300 MW Colossus 1 site in Memphis as operational and its Justified Data Campus in Kentucky as under construction. In Texas, Anthropic is reportedly in talks to lease at the 2,842-acre Project Longhorn campus in Bastrop County. In May, Hitachi agreed to deploy Claude across its roughly 290,000-person workforce, and Anthropic has held data center talks in Australia, according to The Next Web.

Why it matters

A 500 MW commitment would reset the Osaka market in one stroke. The largest facility there today is 46 MW; Anthropic's campus would be more than ten times that size and the clearest sign yet that frontier AI labs, rather than cloud providers, now set the scale of new development in Asia.

The power plan is the other tell. When the grid is the slow option, on-site generation becomes the default.

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• NTT
• Anthropic
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