GLP Breaks Ground on First Data Centre in Japan

Industrial developer GLP has broken ground on its first data centre project in Japan, a 31-megawatt campus in western Tokyo.

The first of three buildings at the Tokyo West 1 complex is expected to enter service by February 2025 with 10MW of IT load, GLP said Thursday in a release. Buildings 2 and 3, representing 10MW and 11MW respectively, will be developed later at the same site.

The Singapore-headquartered builder said the new facility sits in an area with low risk from natural disasters and will feature private meeting rooms, offices and common rest areas. Jennifer Weitzel, president of GLP’s global data centre business, called it “the first of many groundbreakings in Japan” as the firm seeks to provide needed capacity to local enterprises and global hyperscalers.

“With more than 600MW of IT load currently available across our four planned campuses in Tokyo and one in Osaka, we are positioned to deliver sustainable, safe, secure and reliable data centre solutions to satisfy current and future demand from business application, cloud, and AI computing deployments,” Weitzel said.

Going for Gold

Building 1 of the new campus will offer 8,700 square metres (93,646 square feet) of floor area across three storeys on a 3,400 square metre site. GLP targets a LEED Gold sustainability certification for the project, tapping clean power sources made available by the developer’s renewable energy arm.

“We will leverage our expertise, scale and synergies with our renewable energy business to provide customers with sustainable digital infrastructure to power the future,” said Yoshiyuki Chosa, president and CEO of GLP Japan.

Led by co-founder and CEO Ming Z Mei, GLP in early 2022 announced plans to invest more than JPY 1.5 trillion ($12 billion) over five years to deliver data centres with 900MW of total power capacity in Asia’s second-largest economy.

GLP described Tokyo West 1 as a significant milestone under the leadership of former Microsoft exec Weitzel, who joined the firm in July of last year. The London Business School grad spent six years at the software giant, serving as vice president for cloud infrastructure lease and M&A, and previously held various leadership roles at US-based Digital Realty.

GLP manages $125 billion in assets worldwide and has more than 1,500MW in its global data centre pipeline, including seven in-flight campuses across Japan, the UK and Brazil.

Bit Barn Boom

Japan’s data centre market has continued to attract interest from developers at home and abroad in 2023, with Singapore-based Digital Edge entering a partnership with Japanese builder Hulic earlier this year to develop a carrier-neutral data centre in downtown Tokyo, marking the platform’s seventh facility serving the capital city area.

In February, a joint venture of Mitsubishi Corporation and Digital Realty opened a fourth building at its Osaka campus. The latest phase offers up to 21MW of IT capacity, bringing total capacity at the campus to more than 70MW.

Last December, GLP arch-rival ESR announced it was teaming up with US-based Stack Infrastructure on a 72MW Osaka campus targeting hyperscale customers. The project will bring Hong Kong-listed ESR’s Japan portfolio to 168MW, with Osaka also being home to the company’s first-ever data centre investment: the 96MW ESR Cosmosquare hyperscale campus under development in the Nanko Kita area near the city centre.