JERA Co. said Thursday that it will spend $15 billion with two partners to build a large artificial intelligence data center at a thermal power station in Chiba, near Tokyo, according to a Jiji Press report carried by Nippon.com.
The data center will have a power capacity of up to 400,000 kilowatts, making it one of the biggest data centers in Japan. It is expected to go into operation around 2028.
The facility will be constructed inside the Chiba thermal power station itself and supplied with electricity directly, which the report says eliminates the need to set up large-scale power transmission facilities and allows the data center to begin operations more quickly. The Chiba plant is run by JERA, a Japanese electricity supplier jointly owned by a unit of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. and Chubu Electric Power Co.
The project is the first phase of a partnership agreement JERA signed on Thursday with Dell Technologies Inc., a U.S. technology company, and Rhaelm Holdings Ltd., a British data center developer, aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure development.