Electronics company Sharp has sold part of a former LCD screen manufacturing plant in Osaka, Japan to telco KDDI for an AI data center.
The companies this week announced that KDDI has taken over part of the Sakai Display Product Corp. (SDP) site, located in the Sakai area of Osaka.
Reports that Foxconn, Sharp’s parent company, was planning to turn the site into a data center campus came to light last summer. Telehouse-parent KDDI first signed an agreement with Sharp to develop a data center at the Sharp factory back in June 2024 and announced plans to acquire the site in December.
Details are scarce, but the site is set to host ‘at least 1,000 servers,” including a large number of GPUs. It will utilize both air and liquid cooling.
“The Osaka Sakai Data Center will be equipped with the latest GPU infrastructure, including the NvidiaGB200 NVL72, and will be capable of developing large-scale generative AI models with trillions of parameters at high speed, with the aim of starting operations in fiscal 2025,” KDDI said this week.
Construction began on the plant in November 2007. The 1.27 million sqm (13.6 million sq ft) site was launched in 2009 by Sharp, but its SDP unit and the wider company have been facing losses amid increased price competition for LCD panels.
SoftBank has also acquired part of the site for its own data center development. Set on 440,000 sqm (4.7 million sq ft), SoftBank aims to construct a 750,000 sqm (8 million sq ft) data center, with the potential to expand to 400MW in the future.
KDDI is the parent company of Telehouse, which operates data centers around the world, including across Asia.
