SoftBank — Sakai AI Data Center

SoftBank is building a 150 MW AI data center at the former Sharp LCD factory site in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, with completion targeted for late 2026. The facility is purpose-built to host NVIDIA Blackwell GPU systems (DGX B200 and GB200 NVL architectures), serving as a primary “AI Factory” for SoftBank’s sovereign AI initiative in Japan.

The Sakai site was selected for its existing industrial electrical infrastructure — the Sharp factory, which SoftBank acquired, had heavy-duty power delivery designed for semiconductor manufacturing, making it well-suited for repurposing as a high-density AI compute facility. The building’s footprint and structural properties allow for dense rack deployments with liquid cooling systems.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has positioned Japan’s AI sovereignty as a national imperative and SoftBank as its primary vehicle. Son announced in January 2025 that SoftBank would invest $100 billion in US AI infrastructure (as part of the Stargate consortium with OpenAI and Oracle), and has simultaneously committed to building Japan’s sovereign AI computing base. The Sakai facility is the flagship of Japan’s domestic AI infrastructure ambitions — providing compute for Japanese LLM development, scientific research, and enterprise AI workloads without routing through US or other international cloud providers.

The facility will provide GPU-as-a-Service capacity to Japanese corporations, universities, and government agencies developing AI for Japanese-language applications, industrial automation, drug discovery, and financial modeling. SoftBank has also announced partnerships with ARM Holdings (which SoftBank owns) to develop custom AI chips for the facility’s future phases.