We Have Published "Data Center On-Site Services Opportunities: 2026 Industry Report"

Two Sheep Co., Ltd. has published "Data Center On-Site Services Opportunities: 2026 Industry Report." Starting from the current state of Japan's data center market, it sets out the business opportunities for companies that take on on-site work such as server installation, cabling and part replacement, and how such companies should approach them. We compiled it independently from research firms' and government publications, company press releases and other public information available as of November 2026. We cover the field workforce in detail in "Japan's Data Center Field Workforce: 2026 Industry Report".

Key Points

• Scope: the business opportunity for "data center on-site services" such as server installation, cabling and part replacement, reviewed from public data on markets, technology, workforce and rules
• IDC Japan forecasts Japan's colocation market will grow from ¥971.7 billion in 2024 to ¥1.7817 trillion in 2029. According to CBRE, occupancy in Greater Tokyo is 94%
• Blackwell AI racks (GB200/GB300 NVL72) draw about 120–142 kW per rack and require liquid cooling. As large GPU deployments continue in Japan, we expect on-site work to grow in volume and difficulty
• We see five areas of demand: AI deployments, overseas firms entering Japan, new suburban and regional sites, equipment refresh/removal and data erasure, and facility relocation and consolidation
• Yet 53% of operators struggle to find qualified staff (Uptime, global). We see the keys as standard procedures and records, multilingual coordination and one service from shipping to installation

1. The Market Today: Demand in Numbers

Market size: colocation at about ¥1.8 trillion in 2029

In November 2025, IDC Japan forecast that Japan's data center colocation market (revenue) would grow from ¥971.7 billion in 2024 to ¥1.7817 trillion in 2029 (a compound annual growth rate of 12.9% for 2024–2029). Hyperscale colocation is expected to exceed 40% of the total market in 2029. IDC says enterprise colocation is held back as corporate IT moves to the cloud, but will stay in positive growth because, as IT environments become more complex, operators earn more from the operations services they provide.

In May 2026, Fuji Chimera Research Institute forecast that Japan's data center services market will grow to ¥6.8189 trillion in 2030 (up 60.0% from 2024). It puts total floor area at 4,587,750 m² in 2025 (estimate) and expects it to reach 6,892,220 m² in 2030, with the Kanto region accounting for more than 60% and growth continuing mainly in Kanto and Kansai, where many new facilities are being built. In its previous survey in March 2025, it said new construction would peak around 2026–2028 (the 2026 edition covers a wider scope, so its figures cannot be compared directly with the previous edition).

Capacity and occupancy: little free space in Greater Tokyo

• IT power capacity: IDC Japan (February 2025) forecasts that the IT power capacity (IT load) of operator data centers will grow from 2,365.8 MVA at the end of 2024 to 4,499.6 MVA at the end of 2029 (13.7% a year on average). It expects new builds of more than 300 MVA to continue every year
• Tokyo operating capacity: according to CBRE (June 2026), Tokyo's operating capacity was 1,086.0 MW in Q1 2026, up 14.4% from a year earlier, and the vacancy rate was 6.0% (it is not stated whether the MW figure is IT load)
• Occupancy: in CBRE's Japan report (October 2026), occupancy in Greater Tokyo was 94% in Q1 2026, up 7 percentage points from 87% in 2024
• AI-ready capacity: according to Impress Research Institute (January 2026), data centers in Japan that explicitly state support for AI servers had about 300 MW of IT power supply capacity in total at the end of 2025, which is expected to reach about 600 MW at the end of 2026 and about 800 MW at the end of 2027
• Expected openings: the institute expects around 10 buildings to open in 2026 (at least 4 of them explicitly AI-ready) and around 18 in 2027 (at least 8), while noting that some construction starts are being pushed back and some plans are falling through

The Organization for Cross-regional Coordination of Transmission Operators (OCCTO) projects that new and expanded data centers will add 640,000 kW to peak electricity demand in fiscal 2026, 3.28 million kW in fiscal 2030 and 6.61 million kW in fiscal 2035. Compared with its previous projection, the timing of the increase has shifted later because of construction delays and changes to plans.

Investment: large plans continue, including from overseas players

• Microsoft: announced it will invest US$10 billion (about ¥1.6 trillion) in Japan in 2026–2029 (April 2026)
• AWS: plans to invest ¥2.26 trillion in its Tokyo and Osaka regions by 2027 (January 2024)
• Oracle: announced plans to invest more than US$8 billion in cloud and AI in Japan (April 2024)
• AirTrunk: announced plans to develop OSK2, its second site in Osaka (up to 100 MW of IT capacity across the campus), and says that including it, its sites in Japan will total about 530 MW. It plans to invest a total of about US$8 billion (about ¥1.2 trillion) across existing and planned projects (December 2025). In March 2026 it said construction had begun on more than 100 MW of additional IT capacity at TOK1 in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture (which AirTrunk describes as its East Tokyo campus), and in October 2026 it was reported to have raised a further US$1 billion to introduce liquid cooling
• Digital Realty: began construction of KIX15 (24 MW, planned to start operating in Q4 2028) at the Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture campus of MC Digital Realty, its joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation. Once it is complete, MC Digital Realty is expected to have 10 facilities in Japan with about 220 MW of IT capacity (October 2026)

We also cover each company's investment plans in "Japan Data Center Investment Trends: October 2026 Report".

2. Five Areas Creating Demand for On-Site Work

Area 1: AI server deployments (high density, liquid cooling, heavy equipment)

According to NVIDIA's documentation, GB200 NVL72 houses 72 GPUs in one rack and liquid-cools the CPUs and GPUs with cold plates. The rack draws about 120 kW and uses eight 33 kW power shelves. Its successor, GB300 NVL72, requires up to 142 kW. Supermicro's GB200 NVL72 rack is 2,236 mm tall and is paired with an in-rack or in-row coolant distribution unit (CDU). DGX B200, with eight GPUs, is 10U and weighs up to 142.4 kg, and DGX B300 weighs 168 kg (PSU version). Vera Rubin NVL72, the successor to Blackwell, entered full production in 2026; its compute trays are 100% liquid-cooled and use 45°C coolant.

In Uptime Institute's 2026 survey (global), 24% of respondents said they have racks of 30 kW or more (19% the year before), and about one in seven said they have racks of 50 kW or more. On the other hand, about three-quarters of respondents have no racks of 30 kW or more.

Large GPU deployments are also continuing in Japan.

• SoftBank Corp.: in July 2025 completed a platform of more than 4,000 Blackwell GPUs built with DGX B200, bringing its AI computing platform to more than 10,000 GPUs and 13.7 EFLOPS in total. In December 2025 it began operating a platform built on GB200 NVL72 (1,224 GPUs), with direct liquid cooling of the GPUs and CPUs. It plans to expand this to more than 4,000 GPUs in the future. In May 2026 it announced a GPU cloud service based on GB200 NVL72 and other GPUs, to be offered from October
• SAKURA internet: with certification from METI, plans to deploy about 8,000 GPUs, including B200, by December 2027. In July 2026 it decided to invest ¥26 billion in items including rack systems equipped with HGX Rubin NVL8, with delivery scheduled for January 2027. As of October 2026 it described its GPUs as running close to full capacity, and it had invested ¥52.1 billion of a ¥113 billion investment plan
• KDDI: began operating its Osaka Sakai data center on the site of Sharp's former Sakai plant in January 2026, running AI servers such as GB200 NVL72 with direct liquid cooling added to air cooling. It plans to set up a container-type data center inside the building in fiscal 2027 and install HGX Rubin NVL8 (October 2026)
• National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST): ABCI 3.0 consists of 766 nodes with 6,128 H200 GPUs and houses 144 high-density racks. From 30 October 2026 it stopped issuing additional fiscal 2026 points and accepting new groups, citing unused points that exceed the computing resources it can provide

Receiving facilities are also adding support for liquid cooling. NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS (NTT Communications at the time of the announcement) announced "Green Nexcenter", a colocation service supporting 20–80 kW per rack for direct liquid-cooled servers, and set out plans to roll it out at sites including its Yokohama No. 1 and Osaka No. 7 data centers. In April 2026 the NTT Group announced that NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS had begun building an AI data center with liquid cooling as standard in central Tokyo (Shinagawa; 11.7 MW of IT load, to be expanded to 24 MW, with service planned to start in the second half of fiscal 2029). MC Digital Realty's NRT14 in Inzai (opened in April 2026) supports up to 150 kW per rack, and Princeton Digital Group's TY1 in Saitama City supports up to 140 kW per rack. IIJ has designed Building 3 of its Shiroi Data Center Campus (planned to start operating in fiscal 2026) to accommodate liquid-cooled GPU servers, explaining that such racks are large and also need ample space for power supply.

In our view, GPU server deployments need more people and more steps than conventional servers, because of moving in and installing heavy equipment, cabling many power and network connections, and checks around liquid-cooling equipment. With Impress Research Institute expecting around 10 data center buildings to open in 2026 and around 18 in 2027, a large amount of work may pile up in a short period.

Area 2: overseas companies entering Japan

Overseas data center operators and GPU cloud providers also continue to enter Japan.

• AirTrunk: opened a headquarters in Roppongi, Tokyo, three times the size of its previous office. It has more than 100 employees in Japan and plans to double that number soon (December 2025)
• STT GDC: opened STT Tokyo 1 (up to 32 MW) in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture, in June 2025 and is developing STT Tokyo 2 (up to 38 MW). The planned start of operations for Tokyo 2 has moved from early 2027, as announced at the April 2024 groundbreaking, to late 2027 (August 2026). In October 2026 it secured a ¥93 billion green loan for the two buildings
• Princeton Digital Group: opened the first building of TY1 in Saitama City (96 MW of IT capacity across two buildings, US$1 billion investment) in April 2025. According to an April 2025 report, all floors of the first building were scheduled for completion by the end of December 2026
• Digital Edge: opened TYO7 in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, in September 2025, its ninth site in Japan. In October 2026, as a member of a consortium led by Mitsubishi Estate, it was selected as the preferred negotiating party for a large data center site in Utsunomiya
• Goodman: signed a 20-year lease with a global hyperscale customer (not named) for the first 50 MW of its planned 1 GW-scale campus in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture (planned to start operating in early 2028; August 2026)
• GMI Cloud (a US GPU cloud provider): announced a plan for an AI computing hub in Kagoshima Prefecture that can be expanded to up to 1 GW (US$12 billion in total, March 2026). In April 2025 it also formed a partnership with OPTAGE, part of the Kansai Electric Power Group, saying they would validate GPU servers in the Kansai region toward opening a Japan region
• Ubitus: signed a contract for a site for an AI data center in Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture, held a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2026 to begin full construction, and aims to complete the main build-out within 2027

Research firm DC Byte estimates the hyperscaler funds committed to Japan since 2024 at US$27 billion.

For overseas operators and their customers to run equipment in Japan, they need to import the equipment and clear customs, coordinate with facilities in Japanese, and handle each Japanese facility's own procedures.

Area 3: new builds in suburban and regional areas

According to JLL (January 2026), about 90% of Japan's data center power capacity is concentrated in Greater Tokyo and Greater Osaka. Meanwhile, the time from applying for power to receiving it is said to be about 8–10 years in Greater Tokyo and about 3–5 years in Greater Osaka. DC Byte says planned capacity in Kyushu reached about 3 GW by Q2 2026 (about 21 MW in operation).

New sites are spreading to locations away from city centers, such as Inzai in Chiba Prefecture, Saitama City, Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture, the Keihanna area, Minoh and Ibaraki in Osaka Prefecture, Tomakomai in Hokkaido, Takamatsu in Kagawa Prefecture, Maizuru in Kyoto Prefecture and Kagoshima Prefecture. SoftBank aims to start operating AI data centers with power-receiving capacity of about 50 MW in Tomakomai (fiscal 2026) and 140 MW in Sakai (fiscal 2027). As of October 2026, the Tomakomai data center was under construction, aiming to open within fiscal 2026.

Policy is also nudging sites toward the regions. In September 2026 METI certified its first batch of "GX strategic zones", including 9 regions and 10 locations in the data center cluster category (with conditions such as steady implementation of the plans), under a scheme that aims to create gigawatt-scale data center clusters over roughly the next ten years. Grid connection rules are changing too: since October 2026, an application for extra-high-voltage power is cancelled unless the construction cost contribution is paid within three months of the grid operator's supply approval, and new rules requiring large users of 30 MW or more to release reserved capacity and settle construction costs if they postpone the start of supply by more than a year or reduce their contracted power are scheduled to apply from April 2027.

At sites far from city centers, every job takes time and money for people to travel. In its estimate of Japan's employment structure toward 2040, METI expects shortages of field workers in general, not only in data centers, to be larger in regional areas. Alongside efforts to develop local workers, we believe it will be important to plan work schedules carefully and to put in place procedures that can be checked remotely.

Area 4: equipment refresh, removal and data erasure

Major cloud providers are revising the useful lives of their servers. Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) extended server useful lives from four years to six, and Meta extended them to 5.5 years. Amazon, on the other hand, shortened the useful life of some servers and network equipment from six years to five from January 2025, and in Q4 2024 retired some equipment early and recorded about US$920 million in accelerated depreciation and related charges. It cited the fast pace of technological progress, particularly in AI and machine learning. The timing of equipment replacement is starting to differ by operator and use.

When equipment is removed, reliable data erasure is essential.

• Personal Information Protection Commission (PPC) guidelines: personal data, and equipment on which it is recorded, must be disposed of by means that make it impossible to restore. The guidelines also say it is important to keep records of deletion and disposal and, when the work is outsourced, to confirm the contractor's work through certificates or similar
• Adding cryptographic erasure (draft): at its meeting on 28 October 2026, the PPC took up a draft revision of the guidelines that adds cryptographic erasure to the examples of equipment disposal methods, and it is inviting public comments from 29 October to 27 November
• Guidelines for local governments: in March 2026, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) revised its guidelines so that, for recording media in My Number administrative systems, "purging" with dedicated erase commands or similar methods is also allowed in addition to physical destruction
• Third-party certification: in fiscal 2025, the Association of Data Erase Certification (ADEC) had 49 member companies, and 18 companies had had their erasure processes certified

In June 2026, the National Hospital Organization Hokkaido Medical Center announced that some hard disks it had sent to an outside contractor for shredding had not been shredded and had circulated outside the hospital, and set out measures to prevent a recurrence, including making physical destruction on hospital premises the rule. The organization's Hokkaido Cancer Center announced a similar case, saying the recovered hard disks held information on about 8,800 patients. In removal work, the records of erasure or destruction, through to the handover of certificates, need to be designed in as part of the job.

SAKURA internet ended its legacy "Sakura Dedicated Server" service (generations 1–7 and the Koukaryoku series) in November 2025 and June 2026, citing difficulty in securing maintenance parts. Securing maintenance parts is one of the triggers for considering equipment replacement or migration.

Area 5: facility relocation and consolidation

• Facility rebuilding: I-NET Corp. plans to end services such as colocation and housing at its No. 1 Data Center on 31 December 2026 and rebuild it as a dedicated center for a new use. It is guiding users to move to its No. 2 Data Center and other sites
• Energy-efficiency standards: under the Act on the Rational Use of Energy and the Shift to Non-fossil Energy, certain data center operators have a target of PUE 1.4 or lower by fiscal 2030, and data centers newly built from fiscal 2029 onward are required to achieve PUE 1.3 or lower (from the fiscal year after two years have passed since operation began; in force from April 2026)
• Business reorganization: in April 2026 SoftBank took over the data center business of its subsidiary IDC Frontier through an absorption-type company split

As older facilities are rebuilt or made more efficient, equipment has to be moved. A move requires planning, transport, reinstallation and operational checks to be managed as one continuous process.

3. The Challenge: Balancing Manpower and Quality

In Uptime Institute's 2026 survey (global), 53% of data center operators said they have difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs, up from 46% the year before. The areas with skill shortages included electrical (38%), junior and mid-level operations staff (38%), operations management (35%) and mechanical (34%). In Uptime's 2025 staffing research, 64% of organizations had data center employees leave in the past 12 months, and turnover was highest among junior and mid-level operations staff (57%). We look at the situation of construction and electrical workers in Japan in "Japan's Data Center Field Workforce: 2026 Industry Report".

On quality, human error is a challenge. In Uptime Institute's 2025 outage analysis, about 40% of organizations had experienced a major outage caused by human error in the past three years, and 85% of these were caused by staff failing to follow procedures or by flaws in the procedures themselves. Its 2026 analysis also found that failure to follow procedures is the main cause of human-error outages, and that mistakes during installation and operation are also common. In Uptime's 2026 survey, 89% of respondents who had experienced a high-impact outage said it could have been prevented with better management, processes or configuration.

Users are also increasingly turning to outside facilities. In the same 2026 survey, external facilities and services such as colocation and cloud accounted for 46% of enterprise respondents' IT workloads, exceeding their own data centers (44%) for the first time. In 2021, IIJ reported that the number of visitors to its own data centers had fallen by 23%, while requests for its outsourced operations service (remote hands) had risen by 24% (April 2020 to January 2021, year on year; the company attributed this to the spread of COVID-19).

Many data center operators offer their own remote hands services. Equinix, AT TOKYO, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS, MC Digital Realty, KDDI (Telehouse), Colt DCS, Digital Edge, STT GDC and others offer services such as equipment installation, cabling, part replacement and first response to faults, and the scope of work differs by facility. Customers use these facility services depending on the work and the facility, and for work spanning facilities run by different operators, or projects involving shipping and customs clearance from overseas, one option is to combine them with an outside on-site service that handles everything in one package, from shipping and installation to the completion report.

4. What On-Site Services Need to Do (Our View)

Based on the above, we believe on-site services will need to take the following approaches.

• Standardize procedures and records: make written work procedures, before-and-after photos and checks by more than one person the standard, to prevent human error. The finding that most human-error outages stem from procedures shows that the quality of on-site work is itself a source of value
• Prepare for high-density, liquid-cooled equipment: teams need to plan the delivery of heavy equipment, handle large volumes of cabling and work around liquid-cooling equipment in line with the procedures of equipment makers and facilities
• Handle everything from shipping and customs to installation and operational checks as one process: equipment from overseas takes a long time from procurement to installation, and the more handoffs there are along the way, the more likely delays and miscommunication become
• Coordinate in multiple languages: work details, facility access procedures and schedules must be communicated accurately between overseas customers and Japanese facilities
• Keep evidence of removal and data erasure: treat erasure and destruction methods, records and the handover of certificates as part of the work
• Share roles with facility services: it is important to build relationships that complement facility operators' remote hands and take on the work customers need, in line with their plans

5. What Two Sheep Co., Ltd. Provides

Two Sheep Co., Ltd., headquartered in the Telecom Center Building in Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, acts as the "local hands" for customers running equipment in Japan, with the following services. Customers without their own on-site team can ask us for the work they need, when they need it.

• 24/7/365 on-site work (Remote Hands): at data centers in Tokyo and Osaka (Equinix TY and OS sites, AT TOKYO CC1 and CC2, NTT and others), we handle server rack-mounting, cabling, part replacement (RMA), status checks and more
• International shipping and import/export customs for IT equipment: we arrange transport, customs clearance and delivery from overseas all the way into the data center
• Data center migrations, IP transit and private-line arrangements, and optical module sales (ModuleSheep)
• Support in Japanese, English and Chinese: we coordinate between overseas customers and Japanese data centers

Our work has included moving 100 production servers from Equinix TY8 to AT TOKYO CC1 (completed within the planned maintenance window), door-to-door delivery and customs clearance of network equipment to 29 sites in 16 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, and cold/hot aisle containment, cable tray and power cabling work at Equinix HK3 in Hong Kong (completed in June 2026).

Related Reports

• Japan's Data Center Field Workforce: 2026 Industry Report
• Japan Data Center Investment Trends: October 2026 Report
• Japan's Data Centers in October 2026: Industry Report
• Japan Data Centers & AI Compute Infrastructure: 2026 Industry Report
• Optical Transceivers for AI Data Centers: 2026 Industry Report

Main Sources

• IDC Japan: Japan data center colocation market forecast (November 2025, Japanese)
• IDC Japan: Japan data center capacity forecast (February 2025, Japanese)
• Fuji Chimera Research Institute: Data center business market survey, 2026 edition (Japanese)
• Fuji Chimera Research Institute: Data center business market survey, 2025 edition, previous survey (Japanese)
• CBRE: Global Data Center Trends 2026
• CBRE: Japan Special Report (data centers)
• Impress Research Institute: Data Center Research Report 2026 (Japanese)
• OCCTO: Fiscal 2026 demand projections for Japan and each supply area (Japanese)
• JLL: Japan's data center market (January 2026) (Japanese)
• METI: Certification of the first batch of GX strategic zones (September 2026) (Japanese)
• Agency for Natural Resources and Energy: Next-Generation Power Grid Working Group, 13th meeting, Material 1 (October 2026) (Japanese)
• Uptime Institute: Global Data Center Survey 2026
• Uptime Institute: Annual Outage Analysis 2025
• NVIDIA: DGX GB200 User Guide
• SoftBank Corp.: Start of operation of an AI computing platform with GB200 NVL72 (Japanese)
• SAKURA internet: Results presentation for Q2 of the fiscal year ending March 2027 (Japanese)
• KDDI: Expanding the inference environment at the Osaka Sakai data center (October 2026) (Japanese)
• NTT: Building an AI data center with liquid cooling as standard (April 2026) (Japanese)
• AirTrunk: New Japan headquarters and workforce expansion
• PPC: Guidelines (General Rules Edition) (Japanese)
• Agency for Natural Resources and Energy: Data center power demand and energy-saving efforts (Japanese)

About This Report

• This report was compiled independently by Two Sheep from research firms' and government publications, company press releases, news coverage and other public information available as of November 2026. Market size and capacity forecasts are estimates by the bodies cited, and the company plans and regulations described may change.
• Companies and organizations are named only to illustrate industry trends; their mention does not indicate any business relationship with Two Sheep. Company, facility and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
• 2 November 2026: updated some passages to reflect the latest publications and the status of company plans.
• Contact: Japan@2sheep.jp, or use the contact form on this website.