Over 15 billion dollars for a campus powered off-grid by the neighbouring gas-fired power station, without waiting for a connection to the grid. Commissioning is scheduled to begin in 2028.
JERA, Japan's largest power producer, Dell Technologies and British developer RHAELM signed a memorandum of understanding on October 1 to build a 400-megawatt hyperscale AI data center on land adjacent to the Chiba thermal power plant near Tokyo. The investment exceeds $15 billion (about 2.3 trillion yen). RHAELM will develop, finance and operate the site, with Apollo Global Management on the financing side; Dell will provide the compute infrastructure in standardized arrays.
Electricity at the foot of the turbine
The campus will be supplied "behind the meter" by the neighbouring gas-fired power plant, with a capacity of 4,380 MW, rather than waiting in the queue for grid connections. This is a way of circumventing the electrical constraint that slows down AI projects everywhere, but which also links the operation of the site to fossil fuel production. The announcement does not mention any decarbonisation trajectory.
Operation is scheduled to start in phases in 2028 to reach full power in 2029. The partners are presenting Chiba as the first example of a repeatable model, with the ambition of several gigawatts of AI capacity in Japan in the 2030s.
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