NTT Weighs 1-Trillion-Yen Anthropic Core Data Centre in Osaka

NTT is considering building Anthropic’s first core data centre in Japan, a coastal site in southern Osaka Prefecture that would be handled by NTT Data Group and could cost roughly 1 trillion yen, or about $6.3 billion, Kyodo News reported on October 14, citing a source familiar with the matter. If completed, the project would rank among the country’s largest digital-infrastructure investments of the current AI boom.

Anthropic opened its first Asian office in Tokyo in October 2025. A domestic facility would let the U.S. startup expand sales and support in Japan while keeping sensitive corporate and personal data onshore, a point Japanese officials treat as both a national-security and an operational-risk issue as generative AI workloads climb. Local hosting can also shorten response times for enterprise customers that refuse to ship prompts and documents across the Pacific.

Digital minister Toshiharu Furukawa said Tuesday that the government had asked Anthropic to consider Japan as a data-centre location during a Tokyo meeting with co-founder Jack Clark, and that Tokyo was willing to support such a project. Anthropic’s Claude models, including systems pitched as strong at finding security vulnerabilities, have drawn governments that want closer technical ties and earlier visibility into model behaviour.

What it means in practice

A trillion-yen campus would sit beside other compute pushes, from Apollo’s Chiba AI campus with JERA and Dell to carrier experiments such as NTT Docomo Business rolling out AI managers across dozens of units. It also lands as Prime Minister Takaichi orders a year-end action plan to spread high-performance AI, tying private capital to a public adoption agenda.

Power, land and cooling remain the hard constraints. Osaka’s coastal industrial zones can offer transmission capacity, but communities already wary of data-centre load will expect clear guarantees on grid impact and water use. For Anthropic, a Japanese core site would be a hedge against export controls and a sales tool for banks, manufacturers and ministries that demand domestic residency.

What to watch: whether NTT and Anthropic lock financing and long-term power for Osaka, how much public support Furukawa’s ministry actually writes into the deal, and whether other frontier labs follow with Japan-based training or inference sites.