Japan Plans to Move Its Data Centres to Where the Clean Power Is

Japan has a geography problem. Its data centres sit almost entirely around its two biggest cities, while its large renewable projects and nuclear plants are concentrated hundreds of kilometres away. A joint council of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has set out a plan to bring the two together, and the approach it chose says a good deal about how countries with tight grids will handle the AI build.

The council calls its work "watt-bit collaboration", meaning coordinated planning of electricity and telecommunications infrastructure so that data centres can be built where power is available and connected by fibre to where users are. Its first report, published on 12 June after three meetings, lays out a timeline that runs to the late 2030s. According to the government's 2025 energy white paper, roughly 90 per cent of Japan's data centres are clustered in the regions around Tokyo and Osaka, Energy Tracker Asia reported on 13 August.

"Currently, data centres are being built in the Tokyo-Osaka area," said Naoki Nishikado, head of research at the Mitsubishi Research Institute's Centre for Policy and the Economy. In February 2025, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's cabinet directed the two ministries to build a public-private framework for data centre development. By the latter half of the 2030s, the council envisions data centres distributed widely away from the urban centres, easing the burden on Japan's grids. A distinctive part of the Japanese approach is the use of networks to shift computing to where power is.

The idea is that some AI work, such as training runs or batch processing, does not need to happen next to users. The first concrete test is the selection of regions for gigawatt-scale clusters. For other countries facing similar mismatches, Japan's plan offers a model that treats data centre siting as part of grid planning rather than leaving it to developers.