OBAYASHI CORPORATION (Headquarter: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President: Kenji Hasuwa) has established a new company, MiTASUN Inc., aiming at entering the urban data center ("Urban-DCs") business through development and operation for multiple clusters of the urban-DCs.

The first core data center building, which is located in the central area of Tokyo, Minato-ku, will start operating in FY2028, and in the future, targeting at approximately 100 billion yen as the total investment on the urban-DCs clusters, which will be equal to a large-scale DC, known as "hyperscale," usually located in the suburban area (Suburb-DCs).

Under the Medium-Term Business Plan 2022, the Obayashi Group has been making efforts to expand its business portfolio for sustainable growth through active investments and creation of new business by leveraging strengths of its technologies and networks cultivated in the various business fields, such as building/civil construction, real estate development and green energy business.

Potential demand on the DCs including both suburban and urban areas remains exponentially increasing, with the market size (sales) expected to grow from 2 trillion yen in 2022 to 4 trillion yen in 2027, due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and the growing usages of cloud services. The current trend of the DCs in Japan is to have large-scale DCs concentrated in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, named as Suburb-DCs, due to the limited availability in the land and electricity. However, the potential demands for the urban-DCs has been very high, just because of the low latency speed, the convenient location for maintenance, the low telecommunication cost and the close proximity to data demand areas such as the need for edge computing (*1).

The major challenging for the urban-DCs is to secure and acquire a proper land with the electricity in the highly dense city. However, Obayashi's advanced patented technologies with the accumulated knowhow in real estate development business and the green energy business can overcome these issues. In particular, we will renovate or reconstruct existing buildings with chronic vacancy caused by ample supply of large office buildings into data centers with the medium-power consumption, creating new values for cities and enrich social infrastructure.

The new launched company, MiTASUN Inc., will start doing business in the end of November, 2024, and the first core date center building as the urban-DC is located in the central city of Tokyo, Minato-ku, with the target start of FY2028. We have already secured several lands and listed the land candidates for the second phase in Tokyo, in order to be ready for the cluster of Urban-DCs with the preparation of approximately 100 billion yen as the total investment next 10 years. At the same time, we will actively pursue alliances with a wide range of partners in not only Japan but also overseas. By converting buildings owned by other companies into DCs and interconnecting with other DC operators, we will build a 40 MW-class DC cluster by FY2031 and continue to grow it thereafter.

The Obayashi Group will continue to provide diverse solutions to social issues through technological and business innovation to realize a sustainable society.

• *1　Edge computing
  Technology that distributes processing devices close to users and terminals and perform data processing at network endpoints.