SoftBank Hokkaido Tomakomai AI Data Center

SoftBank Corp. and its subsidiary IDC Frontier broke ground on April 15, 2025 on the Hokkaido Tomakomai AI Data Center, a campus SoftBank frames as a "Brain DataCenter" built specifically to run its in-house generative AI development rather than serve as general-purpose colocation. The 700,000 sqm site in Tomakomai City, Hokkaido Prefecture, is designed to exceed 300 MW of IT capacity, making it one of the largest data centers under construction in Japan, with commercial operations targeted for fiscal year 2026. SoftBank plans to run the facility entirely on renewable energy procured locally within Hokkaido rather than the grid mix serving Tokyo and Osaka. The project is explicitly framed as a decentralization play: Hokkaido's cooler climate and open land reduce cooling load and the risk of concentrating compute in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, and SoftBank says capacity beyond its own AI workloads will be made available to universities, research institutes and partner companies. Neither a detailed cooling methodology nor a customer list beyond SoftBank's own use has been published; the company has disclosed an investment figure of up to USD 400 million for the project's initial phase.