AirTrunk has opened its first Japanese data centre, TOK1, in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo. The campus is designed to scale to more than 300 megawatts, which the company says makes it the largest in the country, with the first phases delivering more than 60 megawatts for its anchor customers.

TOK1 is AirTrunk's sixth data centre in operation, joining three in Australia and one each in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the company says its platform now offers more than a gigawatt of capacity across Asia-Pacific. The site spans 13.25 hectares and is planned for up to seven buildings, served by dedicated on-site 66 kilovolt substations.

The part that took four years

AirTrunk's chief executive, Robin Khuda, said the project had been more than four years in the making, and the things he lists — an acceptable site, multiple anchor tenants, local partnerships and high-voltage power — are the ones that cannot be bought quickly. The building itself took 45 weeks, with more than 500 people working about 550,000 hours and no lost-time injuries, which the company presents as proof of its construction method. The opening was attended by the mayor of Inzai City, Masanao Itakura, a reminder that a project of this size is negotiated with a municipal government as much as with a national one.

The efficiency claim is that TOK1 runs at a power usage effectiveness of 1.15, which the company says is the most efficient in Japan, and a solar-ready roof can take 4,000 square metres of panels. Those are design figures supplied by the company. The speed claim is the one to watch, because a campus built in 45 weeks is only useful if the power and the tenants are ready at the same time.