Residents in districts across the Tokyo metropolitan area have raised concerns about large-scale data centers being built or planned near their homes. Data centers are facilities packed with servers and networking equipment that store and process the data behind cloud services and artificial intelligence. In response, residents and experts formed the Urban Data Center Review Committee last September.
Hiroaki Ise, a member of the committee’s secretariat, says many of the projects share several characteristics.
“Many of them are built on large tracts of former factory sites, parking lots and golf courses next to residential areas,” Ise says. “Most are funded by foreign real estate firms and operated by foreign cloud service companies known as hyperscalers.”
Ise argues that these projects’ locations reflect their investment-driven nature. “Japanese operators would hesitate to build in neighborhoods like these,” he says. “The reason they are planned here is that these are investment-driven developments by foreign companies.”
Offices in Law, Power Plants in Practice
Ise also points to what he sees as a gap in Japan’s regulations. Data centers have no specific usage category under the Building Standards Act, meaning they are generally classified as “offices.” They also fall outside the scope of the Environmental Impact Assessment Act.
“For foreign investors riding the AI boom, Japan is an ideal destination,” he says. “The yen is weak, blackouts are rare, and regulation is light. Japan’s infrastructure is being used, while the profits flow out of the country.”
For nearby residents, Ise says, noise is only one concern. Others include the risk of heatstroke from exhaust heat and the possibility that heavy electricity and water consumption could push up utility costs.
Residents have also raised concerns about fire risks associated with emergency generators, large quantities of lithium-ion batteries, and stores of heavy oil and diesel fuel.
“Data centers are obviously necessary infrastructure,” Ise says. “But the government should establish a specific category for them under the Building Standards Act and impose the same siting restrictions it applies to factories and power plants.”
Concentrated in Tokyo and Osaka
An estimated 90% of data centers in Japan are concentrated in the Tokyo and Osaka areas. According to the privately run Japan Data Center Map, the country had 324 large data centers as of September 28, including 95 in Tokyo and 49 in Osaka Prefecture.
Data centers tend to cluster in major metropolitan areas, where telecommunications infrastructure and maintenance personnel are readily available. Proximity to large numbers of users also helps minimize transmission delays.
Demand has surged with the spread of cloud services and advances in AI. At the same time, operators are increasingly turning to “hyperscale data centers,” which accommodate vast numbers of servers to provide greater processing capacity. These facilities, typically defined as having more than 15,000 square meters of total floor space, have become the dominant model.
Pushing Facilities Out of the Cities
To encourage data centers to spread beyond the major metropolitan areas, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on September 11 designated 15 municipalities in nine prefectures as areas seeking to attract large-scale facilities.
These areas are part of its green transformation strategy, which uses subsidies and deregulation to attract investment and accelerate decarbonization. Akita, Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, Sakaide in Kagawa Prefecture, and Kitakyushu were among those selected.
AI data centers are also expected to vary by purpose. Facilities used for “inference,” which involves processing user queries and generating responses, need to remain relatively close to major population centers to minimize delays.
Data centers used for AI training, which requires enormous amounts of computing power to process large datasets, are more likely to be built in regional areas with easier access to large supplies of electricity.
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(Read the article in Japanese.)
Author: Ikki Tokumitsu, The Sankei Shimbun
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AloJapan.com