ESR Completes First Phase of $2 Billion Data Centre in Japan

ESR Group Limited, Asia-Pacific’s leading New Economy real asset manager, on Thursday said that it has completed the core and shell of its flagship data centre project, ESR Cosmosquare OS1 Data Centre (OS1) in Nanko Kita, Osaka, Japan.

The newly completed OS1 is the first hyper-scale data centre asset within ESR’s 130 MW campus. Being developed over three phases (OS1, OS2, and OS3), ESR’s $2 billion hyper-scale data centre campus strategically sits within 10 km of the major internet and telecommunication exchanges in the Osaka central business district.

This milestone is part of the Group’s accelerated Data Centres strategy to execute 575 MW of committed data centre sites in key markets across APAC, with a pipeline of more than 2 GW worth of land and projects.

As part of the company’s purpose to drive Space and Investment Solutions for a sustainable future, ESR is committed to developing environmentally friendly and industry leading data centre solutions for investors, customers, and the communities.

OS1 is set to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) NC v4 Gold certification. The building is designed with an efficient cooling system to reduce energy use, therefore minimising the need for chillers while ensuring high reliability and flexibility for our customers.

Key Milestone

ESR Group Co-Founder and Co-CEO Stuart Gibson said that this was an important milestone in their first Osaka data centre development, creating a campus-style asset with expansion capability in a prime location of a high growth market.

He said that this development is a flagship project in ESR’s strategic and accelerated rollout of data centres to capitalise on the unprecedented demand for high-performing digital infrastructure across key markets in APAC.

ESR Data Centres CEO Diarmid Massey said that OS1 data centre, which is backed by ESR DC Fund 1, is a notable showcase of their acceleration in strategy to cater to the regional growth of Cloud and Digital Infrastructure.

“We are fulfilling the growing customer need for data centre capacity, that is being turbocharged by the outsized Artificial Intelligence demand that is quickly migrating to APAC. Our pipeline of hyperscale data centres will deliver next-generation environmentally focused solutions to our end customers and business partners to power the growth of digital infrastructure in Osaka and across APAC,” Massey added.

The OS1 data centre will be ready for service in May 2025 and once fitted out, it will provide 25 MW of data centre capacity.

Japan’s booming demand for cloud service solutions is driven by its manufacturing, automotive, and financial services sectors, as well as healthcare and government services.

The accelerating migration of IT workloads from on-premises to cloud data centres in the world’s third largest economy is enabling companies and government agencies to seize the opportunity to innovate and achieve higher resource utilisation, resiliency, security, and energy efficiency.