AirTrunk said on Wednesday it was investing an additional $1 billion in its hyperscale data center campus in the eastern Japanese city of Inzai to enable AI workloads, funding the project with a $1 billion green loan led by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, MUFG Bank and United Overseas Bank. The money will be used to expand capacity and deploy liquid-cooling technology at the 300-plus-megawatt campus, dubbed TOK1, which has traditionally served cloud workloads.
Chief executive Robin Khuda said TOK1 was likely to become the first campus in Japan capable of hosting large-scale AI workload deployment. “Due to geopolitical reasons, we are seeing more and more customers looking to Japan from a North Asian perspective,” he said, adding that deploying AI infrastructure “will get harder in the US” and is “already hard in Europe,” making Asia a “big beneficiary.”
The investment converts an existing cloud campus into AI-ready capacity rather than building a new site: liquid cooling supports higher rack densities than air cooling alone, which is the binding constraint for AI systems that concentrate more heat in each rack.