⚡ In the most crowded parts of Tokyo, a new data centre can wait five to ten years just to get connected to the grid. On October 13, 2026, Nikkei reported that NTT Data is close to a deal to build a site for Anthropic in Osaka that could draw up to 500 MW from the grid. Four days earlier, Osaka Prefecture had told its own data centre council that spare grid capacity along the Osaka waterfront is close to zero.

This is a report, not an announcement

Nikkei's report cites multiple people familiar with the matter. The parties are NTT Data Group, part of NTT, and Anthropic. Construction would cost up to ¥1 trillion (about $6.3 billion at ¥158 to the dollar on October 14, 2026, the rate used throughout), with part of the site running in 2028 at the earliest and a contract targeted before fiscal 2026 closes in March 2027. It would be Anthropic's first dedicated facility in Japan. Japanese-language coverage places it on the waterfront of southern Osaka Prefecture, without naming a municipality.

NTT declined to comment to Reuters. Nikkei got no comment from NTT Data or Anthropic. As of October 15, 2026, neither company's newsroom carries an announcement.

How to read "500 megawatts"

The 500 MW figure is power intake: the electricity the site could draw from the grid, including cooling and the rest of the building. It is not IT load, the power the servers themselves use. Data centre capacity gets quoted both ways, and mixing them up makes projects look bigger or smaller than they are.

A January 2026 forecast from Japan's grid coordinator, the Organization for Cross-regional Coordination of Transmission Operators (OCCTO), expects new and expanded data centres nationwide to add 640 MW of peak demand in fiscal 2026 and 1,660 MW by fiscal 2028. Peak demand and contracted intake are different measures, so the comparison is rough, but a single 500 MW site is not small against that national total.

According to Nikkei Asia, the ¥1 trillion covers construction. Adding GPU servers would push the total to several trillion yen. How the cost would be split has not been disclosed.

Japan's grid was already the bottleneck

We have written before about how AI data centres are pressing against Japan's power supply. Wood Mackenzie estimates that Japanese data centres' power use will grow from 19 TWh in 2024 to 57–66 TWh in 2034, accounting for 60% of Japan's electricity demand growth. OCCTO's January 2026 forecast has data centre peak demand from new projects reaching 6,610 MW by fiscal 2035.

The same OCCTO document notes that, mainly at data centres, construction delays and design changes have pushed start dates later.

The five-to-ten-year wait at the top comes from a then-NTT Global Data Centers executive for Japan and APAC, speaking to Data Center Knowledge in 2025 about the most crowded areas, such as inner Tokyo. A Bloomberg report in August 2026 cited the same executive as saying that in Inzai, a data centre hub east of Tokyo with chronic transmission shortages, the approvals needed to supply power could take eight to ten years.

Bloomberg reported in August, citing people familiar with the matter, that NTT Data plans to quadruple its Japan capacity to 1 GW by 2033. NTT Data said it does not disclose investment plans. If both reports hold, one 500 MW site for one customer would equal half of that target.

Is there room on the Osaka waterfront?

Material prepared for the second meeting of the Osaka Digital Infrastructure Council on October 9, 2026 says spare grid capacity in the Osaka bay area is close to zero. Reinforcement would take about eight years and still would not free up much. Southern Osaka, which the prefecture treats as a separate zone, has a few hundred megawatts of headroom, but supply beyond that would take more than ten years. In the prefecture's survey of 14 companies, securing grid power, both capacity and lead time, ranked as the top siting problem.

Which of those zones "the waterfront of southern Osaka" refers to is not clear from public information. On the prefecture's own numbers, neither offers 500 MW quickly.

Nikkei Asia said that because drawing that much from the grid would take time, the project would first look at on-site generation and fuel cells. "Partial operation in 2028" and "500 MW" are probably two different milestones.

The waterfront already has a precedent: the former Sharp LCD plant in Sakai. SoftBank bought land and buildings there in March 2025 for about ¥100 billion, planning about 150 MW of power intake and later more than 250 MW. KDDI began running a data centre on part of the same site on January 22, 2026. It was built in about six months, against the usual three years or so, because it could reuse the factory's power and cooling equipment. The reports do not say whether the new site would be a former industrial plot like this one.

Why Japan would be on the list at all

Neither company has explained any site choice. On demand, Anthropic announced its first Asia-Pacific office, in Tokyo, on October 29, 2025, and said its Asia-Pacific run-rate revenue had grown more than tenfold in a year.

On data location, Anthropic's current public documents do not promise in-country storage. Its privacy centre states that commercial data is stored in the US, while processing may take place in the US, Europe, Asia or Australia. Its developer API offers two inference regions, US and global, and only the US for storage. A Japanese site could change those options, but nothing published so far says it will.

Japan is not the only candidate either. According to Nikkei Asia, Anthropic is looking at sites elsewhere in Asia, and governments there are vying to attract such projects.

Next to other commitments in Japan

Company Amount Scope Announced
Microsoft $10 billion 2026–2029; AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, skills April 2026
AWS ¥2.26 trillion (about $14 billion) Tokyo and Osaka cloud regions through 2027 January 2024
Oracle More than $8 billion Cloud and AI over ten years April 2024
NTT Data for Anthropic (reported) Up to ¥1 trillion (about $6.3 billion) Construction of one site Reported October 2026

The first three are multi-year, multi-site programmes, and Microsoft's includes things other than buildings. The last figure is construction for one site, before servers. Even so, a single reported project sits in the same order of magnitude as the Japan plans of the largest cloud companies.

Against Anthropic's own spending, Japan is a smaller piece. In November 2025 the company announced $50 billion for US data centres in Texas and New York, built with Fluidstack. The reported Osaka figure is about one-eighth of that.

Singapore, South Korea and India

Singapore froze new data centres in 2019, reopened through a bidding scheme in 2022, and allocated 80 MW to four operators in 2023. In its second call (200 MW), it provisionally gave four operators 50 MW each in August 2026, with conditions including more than half of power from green sources.

In South Korea, SK, GS and Naver plan an initial 8.4 GW of AI data centres, with about 550 trillion won up front and construction targeted for the first half of 2028. In India, Google is putting $15 billion over five years into an AI hub in Visakhapatnam, starting at 1 GW.

Even if a contract is signed by March 2027, the start date will probably be set by work on transmission lines and transformers. When a large AI facility joins the queue for grid connections in your country, does it wait its turn, or get waved through?

References