AirTrunk opened its TOK1 in Inzai last November with 60MW of initial capacity
AirTrunk on Monday announced plans to build its second hyperscale data centre in Japan, with the Tokyo facility raising the Macquarie-backed operator’s capacity to 410 megawatts in the country and 1.2 gigawatts across Asia Pacific.
The new data centre, known as TOK2, will provide 110MW of capacity in western Tokyo to complement AirTrunk’s existing 300MW TOK1 campus serving eastern Tokyo, the Sydney-based firm said in a release.
Built across more than 4.6 hectares (11.4 acres) of land and powered by dedicated high-voltage substations, the TOK2 campus will become the eighth data centre in AirTrunk’s platform, which also includes projects in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
“As Japan continues to digitalise at scale, we are seeing strong shifts in cloud adoption, with analysts projecting the country’s public cloud services market to grow 19.5 percent annually to 2025,” said AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda. “Global and Japanese technology companies are focusing on Tokyo as a key growth market.”
Campus Commitments
After powering up its first Asian data centres in Hong Kong and Singapore in December 2020, AirTrunk opened its TOK1 in Inzai, a commuter suburb of Tokyo near Narita International Airport, last November with an initial capacity of 60MW.
The TOK1 campus comprises seven buildings across more than 13 hectares and features 80,000 square metres (861,113 square feet) of data hall area and 9,600 square metres of office and storage area.
AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda
The carrier-neutral TOK2 is designed for an industry-low power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.15 and will use direct air-free cooling, AirTrunk said. The firm did not reveal a completion date or the precise location of TOK2, saying only that the campus would service a major cloud availability zone. Construction giant Daiwa House is building both Japanese data centres.
Nori Matsushita, AirTrunk’s head of Japan, said the firm is expanding its local team in line with the growing platform and last year’s opening of a head office in Tokyo’s Shibuya area.
“AirTrunk’s multibillion-dollar investment into the economy will support the Japan Digital Agency’s path toward digitalisation, contributing to the country’s post-COVID recovery,” Matsushita said. “We are also creating thousands of jobs in Japan during the development and ongoing operations of our data centres.”
Privately held AirTrunk’s key shareholders include Macquarie Asia Infrastructure Fund 2 under Macquarie Asset Management, a unit of ASX-listed Macquarie Group.
Bit Barns Abound
With over 1.9GW of potential capacity, Tokyo is Asia’s biggest data centre market, according to Knight Frank.
The megacity has seen several launches of server-hosting facilities in recent months, including the April news that ESR would build a 20MW data centre in western Tokyo’s Higashikurume City. The project is the Hong Kong-listed logistics specialist’s second data centre in Japan after starting the business just over a year ago with a 98MW development in Osaka.
The same week as ESR’s announcement, Hong Kong’s Gaw Capital Partners revealed its own acquisition of the Fuchu Building in western Tokyo’s Fuchu City to form part of a nearly 40MW IT campus.
Also pursuing a Japanese digital infrastructure strategy is ESR’s industrial competitor, GLP, which in February disclosed plans to invest at least $12 billion in the country’s data centre market in the next five years.
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