Abandoning the urban model for a suburban mega data center in Ishikari, Hokkaido (2010)

Buying the floor you will not use

What was bought at Ishikari was not land but floor area that would go unused for years. Against a site of 51,448 square metres, the first building covered only 3,850; on 15 November 2011, the day it opened, just 200 of a planned 4,000 racks were in place. What dictated that shape was not a long-range vision but a shortage of strength. Tanaka Kunihiro has said that a young company had no capacity to invest all at once, and that the merit of the design lay in investing little by little and ending up with a large facility. The part it could not afford to build is, in effect, exactly the area it left empty.

It took time, though, for empty area to turn into value. Sales passed $94.5M (¥10bn) only in the year to March 2014, when the second building came online; and by June 2024, with generative AI bidding up compute, some 2,000 GPUs stood at Ishikari and sold out the moment they went on sale. But slack pays only while the demand that arrives next can be measured on the same yardstick. Outside-air cooling cannot keep up with the heat of GPU servers, and the next $112.2M (¥17bn) goes not into land but into liquid cooling. How far the room created by what the company could not buy will carry it depends on whether the next demand asks for width or for heat.