Digital Realty starts construction on a 24 MW AI-ready data center in Osaka
What happened
Digital Realty says its Japanese joint venture has started building KIX15, a 24-megawatt data center at the KIX campus in Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture.
What is under construction
KIX15 is planned as the fifth data center on the KIX campus and is scheduled to begin operating in the fourth quarter of 2028. Digital Realty assigns the facility 24 megawatts of IT capacity, meaning power available to customer computing equipment rather than the site's total utility draw. The project is being developed by MC Digital Realty, the company's 50/50 Japanese joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation.
If completed as announced, KIX15 would bring the joint venture's Japanese portfolio to 10 data centers and about 220 megawatts of aggregate IT capacity. That portfolio total includes existing and planned facilities; it should not be read as new capacity created entirely by KIX15.
How the design targets dense AI workloads
Digital Realty says the building will support both air cooling and liquid cooling. A hybrid design lets operators serve conventional equipment with air while moving heat directly from higher-density processors through liquid loops. The release does not specify maximum rack density, cooling-water use or power-usage effectiveness, so the eventual operating performance cannot yet be compared with other AI campuses.
The facility will also connect to Digital Realty's broader interconnection platform. That matters because training and inference clusters need not only electrical and thermal capacity but high-bandwidth links to cloud services, carriers and distributed data. The company expects customers to include hyperscalers, cloud providers and businesses deploying AI infrastructure, but it names no tenants.
What remains unknown
The announcement does not disclose project cost, financing, power source, construction contractor, customer leases or how much of the 24 megawatts will be configured for liquid-cooled AI racks. It also provides only the scheduled operating quarter, not intermediate construction or energization milestones.
Construction start is more concrete than a development intention, but the full 24 megawatts will not become usable until the building, electrical systems, cooling plant and network connections are commissioned. The next evidence to watch is delivery against the late-2028 schedule and disclosure of contracted customers or initial energized capacity.
Understand the infrastructure
Read the related Grid & Silicon explainer →
AI-assisted synthesis.
Continue your research
Read the original source at Digital Realty company announcement via GlobeNewswire ↗
Explore the freely accessible source for additional detail and context. This is a Grid & Silicon summary, not firsthand reporting.