NTT Data Nears a Deal to Build Anthropic's First Dedicated Data Center in Japan — Up to ¥1 Trillion, 500 Megawatts, Partial Operations in 2028

NTT Data Group is in the final stages of negotiations to build a large-scale data center in Osaka for Anthropic, in what would be the US AI company's first dedicated facility in Japan, the Nikkei business daily reported on Tuesday, citing multiple sources. Construction costs could reach up to ¥1 trillion, or roughly $6.3 billion.

The facility, planned for the bay area in southern Osaka Prefecture, would have a power intake capacity of up to 500 megawatts and is expected to begin partial operations as early as 2028. NTT Data and Anthropic aim to sign an agreement before the end of Japan's fiscal 2026, which closes on March 31. NTT declined to comment and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The project would rank among the largest data center builds in Japan by processing capacity and support Anthropic's generative AI development work. Reuters reported in September that Anthropic had signed its first data center lease in Australia, and the company has been weighing additional sites across Asia as demand for Claude inference grows — a pattern that fits the broader scramble by frontier labs to lock in compute outside the US.

The choice of the Kansai region is deliberate. Compared with the Tokyo metropolitan area, western Japan has more available grid capacity and shorter connection timelines, and the coastline offers large plots suitable for data centers, including former heavy-industry sites. Because securing 500 megawatts through the grid takes time, the initial phase is expected to lean on alternative sources such as fuel cells.

For Japan, the deal lands squarely inside a national priority. Data centers and cloud services sit among the government's 17 designated strategic products and technologies, backed by a plan for ¥32.7 trillion in combined public and private investment through fiscal 2035. Every large AI campus anchors a supply chain of servers, cooling and power equipment, which is precisely the industrial spillover Tokyo is trying to attract.

NTT Data, the systems integration arm of the NTT Group, has been pushing hard into AI-era infrastructure, and a build for one of the leading frontier labs would be a marquee reference win. The scale of the commitment — up to ¥1 trillion against a 500-megawatt envelope — puts it in the same league as the hyperscaler campuses being announced across the US, not a peripheral regional project.

What happens next is the usual caveat: nothing is signed. Nikkei's report is based on unnamed sources, both companies have stayed quiet, and a ¥1 trillion price tag for a facility that starts partial operations in 2028 leaves plenty of room for the numbers to move. But if the agreement lands within the fiscal year as planned, Anthropic would have a dedicated toehold in the world's fourth-largest economy — and Japan would have its highest-profile AI tenant yet.