A consortium of Japanese companies is partnering to test the capabilities of distributed data centers.

Kyushu Electric Power Company, Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ), QTnet, Inc., 1Finity Inc., and Nautilus Technologies recently announced that a “demonstration project for decentralized digital infrastructure construction” in the Kyushu area of Japan will be launched from October 2025.

The six-month project seeks to achieve “optimal synergy” between power resources and computational performance by interconnecting decentralized data centers across the Kyushu area that utilize renewable energy sources.

Small-scale data centers will be deployed across the Kyushu area and interconnected via APN (All-Photonics Network), acting as one large data center. The project will initially comprise two such facilities – though further details weren’t provided.

Kyushu (Kyūshū) is the third-largest and most southerly of Japan's four main islands.

The network architecture will adopt photonics network interface cards (NICs) capable of directly handling optical signals, replacing conventional electrical signal-based communication methods.

The companies said this will be the “world’s first attempt to realize interconnection of distributed data centers.”

Kyushu Electric Power has overall project oversight. IIJ will manage the project design, providing micro data centers and GPU servers. 1Finity, a Fujitsu company, is a global provider of communications networks and will be providing its photonics NIC, which it says enables direct optical signal connections between servers located in different data centers. Nautilus Technologies is a Japanese distributed database firm, not to be confused with the US provider of data center cooling systems. QTnet will manage the construction of the core data center and site-to-site connection lines.

The project will aim to assess the AI processing and distributed databases utilizing decentralized infrastructure – including how processing performance and power consumption change across distributed databases – using photonics vs traditional technology.