SoftBank is set to buy a former Sharp factory for $676 million to convert it into an AI data center in its home market of Japan.

Located in Osaka, the purchase and sale agreement with Sharp includes both the land and buildings of the Sharp Sakai Plant, a former liquid crystal display panel-making site.

SoftBank first announced it was planning the 150MW data center in June last year.

Set on 440,000 square meters (4.7 million sq ft), SoftBank said at the time it would construct a 750,000 sqm (8 million sq ft) data center, with the potential to expand to 400MW in the future.

In the same month, reports surfaced that SoftBank's rival KDDI was planning to build its own data center at the Sakai plant.

The Sakai facility will be SoftBank’s third data center, with two facilities in Tokyo and Hokkaido.

In a report from TechCrunch, SoftBank declined to comment on whether the new site is part of its plans to commercialize OpenAI’s models in Japan.

Last month, OpenAI and SoftBank teamed up to develop and sell an “advanced enterprise AI” dubbed Cristal intelligence. As part of a joint venture - SB OpenAI Japan - the pair will sell Cristal intelligence to other Japanese companies.

The company is also working with Nvidia to build an AI supercomputer in Japan using Nvidia's Grace Blackwell platform.

OpenAI and SoftBank are major investors in The Stargate Project, announced by OpenAI in January of this year. Both companies have pledged $19 billion to the project which expects to see $500bn invested in AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years, $100bn of which will be deployed "immediately."

This month has also seen SoftBank investing $50 million in cryptomine data center firm Cipher Mining, giving it the option to acquire an undeveloped 300MW data center site in Texas that Cipher owns - though it has not been stated if this will be part of the Stargate project. The first Stargate data centers are set to be located in Texas.