AirTrunk plans 300MW hyperscale data centre in Japan

Although opening of Singapore facility delayed due to Covid-19 

Hyperscale data centre developer and operator AirTrunk is entering the Japanese market with a beasty 300MW campus in Toyko to meet rising demand for cloud services.

The data centre, dubbed TOK1, will be constructed in several phases with an initial 60 MW phase due for completion in late 2021. When completed, the campus will be the largest of its kind in APAC, excluding China.

TOK1 will be the company’s sixth data centre in the region and will sit alongside existing facilities in Sydney West (130 MW), Sydney North (110 MW), Melbourne (130 MW), Singapore (60 MW) and Hong Kong (20 MW), taking AirTrunk’s total APAC capacity over the 750MW mark.

That being said, AirTrunk revealed the Singapore SGP1 facility, originally planned for mid-2020 completion, has been pushed back due to coronavirus-related construction delays.

“Japan is a highly developed market with strong international connectivity, underpinning its position as a technology and data centre hub in Asia,” founder and CEO of AirTrunk, Robin Khuda, said. “The rapid increase of cloud adoption in Japan will be enabled by critical infrastructure, including hyperscale data centres like TOK1.”

“TOK1 is part of our ongoing commitment to deliver secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure for our cloud customers in key Asia-Pacific markets. We’re ensuring operational excellence and a consistent experience for our customers across our data centre platform,” said Mr Khuda.

The TOK1 campus will consist of seven buildings set across 13 hectares of land in Tokyo’s Inzai data centre hub.

High voltage power will be sourced from dedicated 66kV substations which AirTrunk has already secured, and the company expects the campus to meet an ultra-efficient Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.15 (where being as close to 1 as possible is the aim of the game).

The cloud services market in Japan is estimated at around $6 billion in 2020, which is likely to grow at a CAGR of around 15% during the period 2019-2025, according to ReportLinker.

In other news, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC announced it has commissioned tech giant NEC to build the fourth generation of its Earth Simulator, a HPC machine used to predict and mitigate natural disasters and other life sciences challenges.