Japanese data centre seeks nuclear electricity supplies

The head of cloud-based gaming services provider Ubitus KK has said the Tokyo-based company is planning to construct a new data centre in Japan and is specifically looking at areas with nearby nuclear power plants.

Ubitus already has two data centres for gaming - located in Tokyo and Osaka to be close to gaming clients - which are operated in partnership with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation.

The company is now looking to build a third data centre to serve generative artificial intelligence. For generative AI, the priority becomes more about the size of energy supply and electricity price, Ubitus CEO Wesley Kuo told Bloomberg.

Kuo said the company is looking to acquire land in Kyoto, Shimane or a prefecture in Japan's southern island of Kyushu, primarily because of the availability of nuclear power in the region. Setting up a data centre in these areas would allow access to a grid with cheap and stable electricity thanks to the nuclear facilities, he said.

Kyoto is close to several nuclear power plants operated by Kansai Electric Power Company, while Kyushu is home to four units managed by Kyushu Electric Power Company. Chugoku Electric Power Company is scheduled to restart unit 2 of its Shimane plant in Shimane Prefecture in December.

"Unless we have other, better, efficient and cheap energy, nuclear is still the most competitive option in terms of cost and the scale of supply," Kuo said. "For industrial use - especially AI - they need a constant, high-capacity supply."

Ubitus expects to select a location for its new data centre in early 2025, Kuo told Bloomberg. The centre will initially have power-receiving capacity of 2-3 MWe, with plans to potentially expand to up to 50 MWe.

In March, Ubitus announced that it had received new investment from California-based software and fabless company Nvidia Corporation, which it said "underscores the immense potential and accelerating demand for generative AI and cloud gaming across Asia and beyond".

Earlier this week, online shopping and web services giant Amazon announced it was investing USD500 million in developing nuclear technologies to power its data centres. That announcement came two days after fellow online giant Google signed a Master Plant Development Agreement with Kairos Power for the development and construction of a series of advanced reactor plants. And last month Microsoft announced it had signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation which would see Three Mile Island unit 1 restarted, five years after it was shut down.