Japanese telecoms firm KKDI has launched the first phase of a new data center in Osaka.

The company this week announced that operations at the Osaka Sakai Data Center, located near the Osaka metropolitan area, started on January 22.

The former Sharp LCD screen manufacturing plant, which was acquired in April 2025, took just six months to convert to data center use.

The four-story facility, totaling 57,000 sqm (613,542 sq ft), is hosting Nvidia GB200 NVL72 hardware. It uses a combination of air cooling and direct liquid cooling.

KDDI said 100 percent of the site’s energy use is offset by renewable power.

The site will primarily serve KDDI, which will offer access to the site’s GPUs via its KDDI GPU Cloud service. The site will start accepting general service applications in April 2026, but the company named three companies as early customers.

KDDI Group company Medical Engineering Institute Inc., together with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, aims to use this data center from April 2026 in order to analyze medical data and explore new research projects using AI. By applying large language models to electronic medical records, the companies hope to help drug discovery, clinical research, and other medical research.

Morgenlot Inc, a research startup, will be using the site to aid fluid analysis in product design, particularly in the manufacturing industry.

KDDI Group company Elyza Inc. will use the site to accelerate the development of domestic AI and its social implementation by developing domain- and company-specific models.

KDDI closed on its acquisition of part of the Sakai Display Product Corp. (SDP) site, located in the Sakai area of Osaka, last year.

Construction of the plant began in November 2007. The 1.27 million sqm (13.6 million sq ft) site was launched in 2009 by Sharp, but its SDP unit and the wider company have been facing losses amid increased price competition for LCD panels.

SoftBank has also acquired part of the site for its own data center development. Set on 440,000 sqm (4.7 million sq ft), SoftBank aims to construct a 750,000 sqm (8 million sq ft) data center, with the potential to expand to 400MW in the future.

KDDI is the parent company of Telehouse, which operates data centers around the world, including across Asia.