APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Japan's Grid Starts Sorting The Real From The Booked

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 5 October 2026

AirTrunk said this week it will triple its Japan spend to as much as $30bn. Unlike most numbers that size, some of it is already financed: a US$1.24bn green loan for Tokyo, and a further $1bn to take the Inzai campus past 300MW. Remember what Inzai was. In July 2023, Equinix and GIC opened TY13x there at 36MW, and that was a genuine event. Our database now books circa 350MW live in Inzai with about 195MW more under construction — and AirTrunk alone wants over 300MW on one campus there.

Japan is where the money went this week. DayOne filed for its US IPO and announced a 200MW campus at Imari City with grid power lined up, first phase 2030. Digital Realty broke ground on 24MW at KIX15 in Osaka. Mitsui Fudosan is putting a data centre in a disused tunnel. And Jera's project with Dell and Rhaelm — the undated $15bn we flagged last week — now carries a figure and a date: 400MW in Chiba, targeted 2028, with Apollo as financing partner. Sitting behind a gas plant, that starts to look like a schedule rather than an ambition.

The quieter story matters more. TEPCO said it will start pushing back on "capacity squatters" — developers holding grid capacity they aren't using. Japan has about 1.4GW under construction against circa 1.9GW live, and its dated commitments reach only roughly 3GW by 2031. Every announced Japanese gigawatt — AirTrunk's, Mitsubishi Estate's 2,500MW, Blackstone's mooted $30bn — has to clear the same interconnection queue. A utility that screens for who is actually building is doing the sorting the market won't do for itself.

That sorting cuts both ways. Firmus and CDC ended Project Southgate this week after delivering 42MW of a 1.8GW program, reported as 97.5% incomplete. Firmus is still heading into an IPO at an implied valuation near A$44bn, with Meta and OpenAI capacity deals behind it, and those tenants are real. We're not writing it off. But 42MW delivered is the number to keep beside the deck.

Australia's week was permission, again. Microsoft won approval for 96MW at Huntingwood and Stockland for 49MW at Macquarie Park, while CDC is rethinking its 576MW Canberra campus after a planning setback, Monash knocked back Centuria, and Victorian councils say the state is cutting them out. Singapore's Digital Infrastructure Bill passed, turning July's licensing proposal into law. Malaysia's regulator said the power system is under strain from data centre demand — worth holding against Johor's planned book.

Sources this week