Japanese telco KDDI is to build a data center on the site of a former LCD screen manufacturing plant in Osaka.

Sharp Corporation and KDDI this week announced that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop an AI data center at Green Front Sakai, the former factory site of Sharp in Sakai, Osaka.

KDDI will acquire the land, buildings, and electrical facilities of the site from Sharp, with the aim of commencing construction of the AI Data Center by the end of March 2025 and putting the center into full-scale operation by the end of March 2026.

Reports surfaced in May that Foxconn, Sharp’s parent company, was planning to shut down the factory and turn it into a data center amid growing losses in its LCD division.

Sharp and KDDI then announced an agreement with two other businesses, IT suppliers Supermicro and Datasection, to redevelop the Sakai plant as an AI data center hosting Nvidia hardware. Timelines for development were not previously shared.

In this latest announcement, KDDI will continue the existing collaboration with Supermicro and Datasection to build and operate the data center without Sharp.

KDDI has previously said the data center will host Nvidia GB200 NVL72s, the GPU company’s newest server racks for training and running AI models.

Further specifications of the data center have not been revealed; a previous KDDI statement simply says the site will be the largest AI data center in Asia.

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

SoftBank has previously said it was also planning to develop a 150MW data center on part of the now-closed plant. Whether KDDI acquiring the site will impact those plans is unclear.