Japan intends to leverage its powerful natural gas trading companies to advance a 140 billion US dollar investment program aimed at accelerating data center construction.

On Thursday, three companies including Dell and Jera, the world's largest natural gas trader, reached an agreement to invest 15 billion US dollars to build a 400-megawatt data center near Tokyo.

Yukio Kanai, Global President of Jera, stated that the three companies plan to complete gas-fired power generation infrastructure supporting 3–4 gigawatts of AI data centers within five years. He said: "The core keyword is rapid power supply capability." Jera can trade 35 million tons of liquefied natural gas annually, enabling it to provide fuel for power plants. According to his estimate, the cost of 1 gigawatt of computing power supporting infrastructure ranges from 35 billion to 45 billion US dollars, which implies that the total investment required to build the above-scale infrastructure would be approximately 140 billion US dollars.

The partners also include the UK-based AI infrastructure company Rhaelm. The three partners plan to standardize the construction of data centers and power facilities in order to accelerate construction progress and reduce costs. The parties are also considering building data centers and power stations simultaneously outside Japan.

This data center and its supporting power plant, located in Chiba Prefecture, a neighboring prefecture of Tokyo, with a total investment of 15 billion US dollars, are expected to commence operations around 2028 and will not be connected to the public power grid.

Japan is home to major data center operators such as NTT Data and SoftBank, and Blackstone Group also plans to invest 30 billion US dollars in Japan over the next few years to deploy related businesses. A report this year by the International Data Center Association shows that US data centers consume 29.2 gigawatts of electricity, accounting for 43% of global data center power consumption, while Japan's figure is only 1.7 gigawatts.

As part of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's strategic key industry investment plan, the Japanese government aims to achieve 32.7 trillion yen (equivalent to 206 billion US dollars) in public-private joint investment in cloud computing and data center infrastructure by 2035.