NTT Data Group is in final-stage talks to build Anthropic's first dedicated data center in Japan, a roughly 500-megawatt facility in Osaka that could cost as much as 1 trillion yen (about $6.3 billion) to construct, Nikkei Asia reported Tuesday. The two companies are aiming to sign an agreement before the end of Japan's current fiscal year, on March 31, with partial operations targeted as early as 2028. NTT declined to comment on the talks, and neither company has confirmed a deal -- this is still a reported negotiation, not a signed contract.
The power figure is the one worth pausing on. NTT Group -- parent of NTT Data, and already Japan's largest data-center operator with more than 160 facilities nationwide -- had roughly 300 megawatts of total IT capacity as of April, working toward a 1-gigawatt target by fiscal 2033 under its internal AIOWN program. The Osaka site's planned 500-megawatt power intake would, on paper, exceed NTT Group's entire current IT fleet. The two numbers aren't quite measuring the same thing -- intake is the gross power drawn at the site, while IT capacity counts only what reaches the computing equipment after cooling and other overhead -- but the gap is large enough that people familiar with the plans say early phases may lean on on-site generation and fuel cells rather than wait on a grid connection at that scale.
What the Osaka numbers actually measure
- 500 MW · Planned power intake
- Gross power drawn at the Osaka site
Includes: All site power draw, including cooling and facility overhead
Excludes: Nothing -- this is the top-line site figure - ~300 MW · NTT Group's current IT capacity
- Power actually delivered to computing equipment, group-wide, as of April 2026
Includes: All of NTT's existing data centers nationwide
Excludes: Cooling and non-compute facility overhead -- not a direct comparison to the 500MW intake figure - $6.3B · 1 trillion yen
- Reported construction-cost ceiling
Includes: Building the facility itself, per Nikkei's reporting of the talks
Excludes: Servers and AI hardware -- installing large numbers of advanced AI servers would reportedly push total investment several times higher
The project would be Anthropic's first dedicated data center in Japan, where the company opened its first Asia-Pacific office in October 2025, signed a cooperation agreement with the Japan AI Safety Institute, and counts Rakuten, Nomura Research Institute, and Panasonic among its customers. It also extends Anthropic's compute build-out beyond the US, where the company committed to a $50 billion program with Fluidstack in November 2025 for sites in Texas and New York -- Osaka would be the first major site reported outside that American footprint.
- NTT Data is in final talks to build Anthropic's first dedicated Japan data center.
- The Osaka site could cost up to 1 trillion yen ($6.3B) with 500MW of power intake.
- That 500MW figure would exceed NTT Group's entire current IT capacity on paper.
- A signing is targeted by March 31; partial operations could start as early as 2028.
- The talks are unconfirmed -- NTT declined to comment and Anthropic has said nothing public.