AirTrunk has broken ground on the second phase of its TOK2 data centre in West Tokyo, three months after construction began on the site in November 2022. The new phase is scalable to about 50 megawatts and, the company says, will be custom built to meet the needs of the cloud.

TOK2 is rated at 110 megawatts, and together with TOK1 in East Tokyo the company says it offers more than 410 megawatts of capacity and gives hyperscale customers two locations in the region. Executives from Daiwa House, Nihon Sekkei and Obayashi, the construction partners, attended the groundbreaking ceremony, along with AirTrunk's head of Japan, Norihiro Matsushita.

What a groundbreaking does not say

The sequence is the interesting part. Companies in this business announce capacity long before it exists, and a second phase announced three months after a first is less a milestone than a statement about how quickly the developer believes it can sell space. AirTrunk presents speed as its distinguishing feature, and at the ceremony it appeared alongside its contractors rather than its customers.

Tokyo is one of Asia's deepest data centre markets, and capacity there is counted in the hundreds of megawatts. The number that is not in the release is how much of TOK2's 110 megawatts is already committed. The company does not publish how much of its capacity is leased, so the useful figure is missing. A groundbreaking is a construction event; the commercial event, which is a signed lease, would tell a reader far more. Together, TOK1 and TOK2 account for more than 410 megawatts in a single metro, a large bet even on a market as deep as Tokyo's. No cost is given for the new phase and no completion date, which for a project of this size is a gap a reader has to fill from somewhere else.