KDDI Osaka Sakai Data Center

KDDI converted a former Sharp LCD panel manufacturing plant in Sakai, on Osaka Bay, into an AI-dedicated data center after agreeing to acquire the site's land and buildings in April 2025. Reusing an existing factory's high-capacity power and cooling infrastructure let KDDI complete the conversion in about six months rather than building from scratch, and the operator brought the four-story, roughly 57,000 sqm facility into service on January 22, 2026, before opening it to general customer applications in April 2026. The site runs Nvidia GB200 NVL72 racks for KDDI's GPU cloud business, including on-premises capacity supporting Google's Gemini model, using a mix of conventional air cooling and direct liquid cooling to manage the resulting rack density. KDDI states the facility's energy use is offset 100 percent by renewable power. The Sakai conversion is part of a broader KDDI push into AI infrastructure alongside a separate partnership with HPE targeting further AI data center capacity, and it illustrates a wider Japanese trend of repurposing idle manufacturing real estate — chosen for its existing grid connections and heavy-floor-load buildings — for GPU-dense computing rather than pursuing new greenfield sites.