NTT Data's 1 trillion yen Osaka data centre for Anthropic is a plan, not a contract

NTT Data Group is in the final stages of talks to build a data centre in Osaka, western Japan, for Anthropic, the Nikkei business daily reported on October 13, citing multiple unnamed sources. Every number attached to the project is a ceiling or a target rather than a commitment, and neither company would discuss it.

What the report puts on the table

Nikkei Asia says the Osaka prefecture facility would be Anthropic's first dedicated data centre in Japan and one of the country's largest by processing capacity. The reported figures:

• Construction cost: up to 1 trillion yen, about $6.3 billion
• Power intake: up to 500 megawatts
• Partial operations: as early as 2028
• Signature: aimed for by the end of fiscal 2026, which ends March 31

NTT Data Group told Nikkei it declined to comment. Anthropic also declined. Reuters, which relayed the report, says NTT Group was not immediately available. The sourcing is one newspaper's sources and the named parties are silent.

Every figure in it is a ceiling

Read the wording closely. Up to 1 trillion yen is a maximum, not a budget, and the $6.3 billion is a conversion of that yen figure at a rate nobody quoted, not a contract value. 500 megawatts is power intake, and megawatts do not become usable compute without knowing the accelerator mix: the report names no chip count, no model and no supplier. As early as 2028 is a best case. The one deadline in the story is a target for signing, not for building.

Power is the constraint the report admits

Nikkei says fitting advanced AI servers would push total investment into the trillions of yen, a larger and vaguer number than the construction figure. It also flags the harder problem: drawing 500 megawatts from the grid takes years, so the project would initially consider on-site generation and fuel cells. No power source has been chosen, no site purchased, and no customer commitment beyond the reported intent has been disclosed.

How it fits Anthropic's build-out

Anthropic has spent the past year signing compute deals at a scale that dwarfs this one. DataCenterDynamics counts at least 14.8 gigawatts of capacity across agreements signed since October 2025, most of it in the United States. A 500-megawatt Osaka site would be one entry in that ledger, and NTT Data runs more than 150 data centres in more than 20 countries, two of them in Osaka, so this extends an existing footprint rather than opening a market. Anthropic also published Frontier Red Team research this week on self-replicating models. What would make the Osaka plan real is a signed agreement, a chosen site and a stated chip count.