SoftBank Sakai AX Factory AI Data Center

SoftBank Corp. is converting a large portion of Sharp's former Sakai liquid-crystal-display plant, on a roughly 450,000 sqm site in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, into a dedicated AI data center the company calls the AX Factory. The acquisition of the land and buildings was agreed in March 2025, and SoftBank's own May 2026 medium-term growth strategy names a target of about 140 MW of power capacity and 110 exaFLOPS of AI compute for the site, figures that have moved across successive company statements as the project scope firmed up. A separate portion of the same former Sharp campus was bought independently by KDDI for its own, already-operating Osaka Sakai data center, so the two are distinct facilities on one former industrial site rather than a single shared building. SoftBank has not published a street address, only the general Sakai City location, nor has it confirmed a firm operational date or any third-party tier certification; the company's own figures describe scale and intent rather than a finished specification. The project sits alongside a wave of Japanese telecom-operator investment in domestic AI infrastructure, aimed at reducing reliance on overseas cloud capacity for large language model training and inference workloads serving the Japanese market.