Japan is moving the most valuable piece of the AI era - computing power - onto its own territory. NTT, a Japanese telecom company, plans to build its first dedicated data center in the U.S. for the AI company Anthropic. This is not only another expansion of Anthropic's infrastructure in Asia, but also reveals Japan's strategic intention to secure domestic computing power in the AI era.

The two parties will cooperate in AI computing infrastructure. The new data center is expected to deploy large-scale computing equipment specifically used for running and training advanced models, providing a foundation for the development of the Claude series in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. In recent years, demand for generative AI has been rising sharply, and the computing power required for training and running large models has grown rapidly. AI companies are investing heavily in new data centers, and Anthropic, a major competitor of OpenAI, is accelerating its global infrastructure network.

For NTT, this cooperation can expand its data center business and help it gain a more prominent position in the AI infrastructure market. In recent years, the Japanese government has been encouraging domestic companies to increase investments in AI and semiconductors, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign digital infrastructure and bring more computing resources of international technology companies to be established in Japan.

The deeper motivation lies in the concept of data sovereignty. As AI applications become widespread, more and more countries are focusing on computing resource security and the ability to deploy locally - for clients such as financial institutions, healthcare, manufacturing, and government agencies, running AI services within their own country has become increasingly important. Therefore, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Anthropic have all been pushing forward regional data center plans. After receiving support from industry giants like Amazon and Google, Anthropic's business has grown rapidly, and Claude has become one of the major generative AI platforms globally. This move of building a dedicated facility in Japan through NTT is seen as a key step for it to strengthen its competitiveness in Asia.