Anthropic is placing its first overseas computing stronghold in Japan's Kansai region. According to a report by Nikkei Asia today local time, negotiations between Anthropic and NTT DATA over the former's first Japan-based data center have entered the final stage. The two parties are expected to sign a final agreement within the current fiscal year, though the facility won't be partially lit up and operational until as early as 2028 — for an AI lab that has always kept its computing power firmly in its own hands, this amounts to staking out a long-term strategic foothold on the western shore of the Pacific in advance.
The site is in Osaka, with a planned scale aimed squarely at 500MW. What does that mean? The bill for civil engineering and infrastructure construction alone already exceeds 1 trillion yen, roughly 42.3 billion RMB at current exchange rates, and large quantities of high-value AI chips still need to be installed afterward — the real money-burning is yet to come. For Anthropic, this is not simply renting a few rows of racks, but rooting an entire computing lifeline, from power supply to training and inference, directly into Japanese soil.
The most intriguing part is its approach to power supply. The report mentions that this data center will initially take the "behind-the-meter" route — that is, generating its own electricity through on-site power generation methods such as fuel cells, rather than immediately relying on large-scale external grid support. This approach buys time for the surrounding power infrastructure to be put in place at its own pace, letting the computing power run first while gradually filling in the dependence on the external grid. At a time when AI data centers in every country are struggling over power grabs, Anthropic's arrangement of "lighting its own small furnace first" instead shows a kind of pragmatic patience.