Nothing says “we’re serious about Japan” like a building that could eat 500 megawatts for breakfast. According to a report from Nikkei Asia, NTT Data Group is in the final stages of talks to build an Anthropic data center in Osaka, at a construction cost of up to ¥1 trillion, or about $6.3 billion.
One caution up front: nothing is signed, and nothing is official. Nikkei cites multiple unnamed sources. As of Tuesday, NTT had declined to comment to Reuters, and I found no statement from Anthropic confirming it.
What the Anthropic data center report says
The site would sit in Osaka Prefecture and would be Anthropic’s first dedicated facility in Japan, Data Center Dynamics reports, summarizing Nikkei. Power capacity could reach 500 megawatts. That would make it one of the biggest data centers in the country.
Partial operations could begin as early as 2028. The two sides reportedly aim to sign by the end of fiscal 2026, which runs through March 2027, according to W.Media’s summary of the Nikkei story.
Why the NTT Data Anthropic deal’s $6.3 billion is not the whole bill
Read the fine print. The figure is a ceiling, as in “up to,” not a flat price tag. It also covers construction only.
Nikkei reportedly says that once you add the GPU servers that actually do the work, the total climbs to several trillion yen, per The Next Web’s read of the report.
In other words, the building is the cheap part. (Yes, the $6.3 billion one.) The chips are where the real money goes, which squares with the broader scramble for AI chip financing deals now topping $90 billion.
Here’s the thing: this is a pattern
Japan is the latest stop on a long shopping trip. Since October 2025, Anthropic has signed compute agreements totaling at least 14.8 gigawatts, according to Data Center Dynamics.
The partner list reads like a conference badge table: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Akamai, Fluidstack, AMD, Lambda, Volta Infra and SpaceX/xAI.
Most of those projects are in the United States, so a Japanese site would be a notable step abroad. Data Center Dynamics also reports that Anthropic confidentially filed for a US IPO in June. So the spending spree is happening while the company gets ready to open its books to public investors.
Can an Anthropic Osaka data centre find the power?
NTT is not a newcomer to this game. NTT Data Group runs more than 150 data centers in over 20 countries and regions, so it knows how to build the box.
Getting 500 megawatts out of the grid is the harder part. W.Media flags power supply as a major challenge, and notes the plans reportedly include looking at alternatives to grid power.
The Japan plan also lands at an awkward moment, because the Pentagon says it has completely stopped using Claude. Even so, demand for compute keeps climbing, as Jensen Huang’s rejection of any AI slowdown makes clear.
What to watch next
Three things matter from here:
- Whether NTT Data or Anthropic confirms the report, or pushes back on it.
- Whether a deal is actually signed by the March 2027 target.
- Whether the terms change, since talks can stall and numbers can move.
For now, treat the Osaka data center as a report, not a deal. But if it holds, it says something simple: the AI race is no longer just about who has the best model.
It is about who can find 500 megawatts and a few trillion yen to plug it into.
