A render of Colt’s upcoming data centre in Osaka
Colt Data Centre Services has begun building its first data centre in Japan under a hyperscale development deal struck by its parent firm Fidelity, finance group Mitsui and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
The 45-megawatt data centre in Keihanna Science City, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) east of Osaka in the Kansai region, will provide 42,000 square metres (452,084 square feet) of floor space when it opens for business in early 2023, Colt said Tuesday in a release.
The carrier-neutral facility is the maiden project for the Japanese Data Centre Development Fund, or Mitsui Fund for short, which was unveiled in July with a C$400 million ($319 million) capital commitment from the CPPIB. The fund teamed up in a 50:50 joint venture with US-based Fidelity Investments to develop and operate data centres through the Colt unit.
“Mitsui is very pleased to celebrate the ground-breaking for the first data centre project in Keihanna,” said Shinsuke Waka, general manager of the financial business division at Mitsui & Co. “Starting with this exciting project, Mitsui hopes to further strengthen our partnership with Fidelity and Colt for our JV.”
Demand and Diversification
The Kansai region in the south of Honshu Island has seen large demand for data centres as companies seek to diversify geographically after Japan’s 2011 earthquake, Colt said.
Quy Nguyen of Colt
“There has been a surge in cloud service demand throughout Japan, all of which requires carrier-neutral network access in the region, as well as disaster recovery sites,” said Quy Nguyen, Colt’s vice president for global accounts and solutions.
Nguyen noted that Kansai’s population of 22.4 million creates enough GDP to position the region at the same level as the world’s top 20 countries.
The Keihanna facility will employ state-of-the-art cooling technologies to ensure high efficiency and support Colt and its clients’ sustainability targets, the company said.
Fund Moves Forward
In July, the JV partners said Mitsui Fund’s initial projects would be hyperscale developments in the greater Tokyo and Osaka areas, targeting 90MW of capacity.
Mitsui’s real estate fund management arm serves as asset manager for the platform, taking responsibility for JV structuring, financing, land sourcing, development support and Japanese customer marketing. Colt handles development management, customer marketing and on-site operations at the projects.
UK-based Colt already has six data centres and 50MW of built capacity in Japan, a country viewed as a top target for data centre builders.
A survey published earlier this year by Arcadis ranked Japan as the third most attractive market globally for developing data centres, with the Dutch consultancy noting the country’s high rate of mobile broadband penetration and large-scale adoption of digital technologies by business as helping to drive data consumption.
In June, Singapore-based Princeton Digital Group announced a $1 billion plan to build a 97MW data centre in Tokyo. In March, US giant Equinix opened its first hyperscale facility in Asia in the Japanese capital.
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