Japanese data center and cloud company Sakura Internet is looking to procure tens of thousands of GPUs.
As reported by Bloomberg, the Osaka-based company is in discussions to buy some 10,000 Nvidia GPUs annually to meet growing demand, according to its founder Kunihiro Tanaka.
“We need some 50,000 to 100,000 Nvidia GPUs to comfortably handle the demand we see today,” he said in an interview. “We would need a million GPUs 10 years from now if demand rises at the current pace.”
Founded in 1996, Sakura Internet is a technology company. Via subsidiaries including ITM, Sakura Mobile, Sakura Cloud, Gehirn, BitStar, Prunus, and BBSakura, the company offers a number of telecoms, data center, software, and cyber services.
The company operates a large data center campus in Ishikari. At full build-out, the 50,000 sqm site will be able to host 6,800 racks across five buildings. The first two buildings were completed in 2011, with a third going live in 2016.
The company also operates faculties in Tokyo (Higashi-Shinjuku, Nishi-Shinjuku, and Daikanyama) and Osaka (Dojima). Its ITManage unit, a data center and cloud services unit founded in 2017 alongside IT firm Terilogy Holdings, also lists a 340-rack site in Yokohama.
Bloomberg noted the company is building another data center on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido that expected to house around 10,800 Nvidia GPUs when it goes online by 2027.
Sakura Internet has been providing GPU resource services since 2016. In January, it launched a generative AI cloud service based on GPUs called High Firepower.
In August, the company announced it has completed a project to install approximately 2,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs at its Ishikari facility, and planned to deploy 8,000 more by the end of December 2027. Last month it said it would deploy an additional 800 H100s by December, ahead of that tranche of 8,000 – as well as a further 40 GPUs this month. The company has also ordered HGX B200s.
To accommodate the deployment of GPUs at the site, Sakura said over the summer that it would invest in two container-type data centers for the Ishikari site, located in Ishikari City, Hokkaido. The first will be delivered by November 2025, and the second by November 2026.
Earlier this month, Sakura also announced it would roll out its GPU cloud to Equinix’s IBX data centers in Japan and across Asia. Details weren’t provided. Equinix has four facilities in Osaka and 14 in Tokyo.
