Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) has begun construction of KIX15, a planned 24-megawatt data center at its KIX Campus in Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture. The facility is designed for high-density computing and hybrid air- and liquid-cooling, adding planned capacity for cloud providers, hyperscalers and organizations deploying AI infrastructure in Japan.
The project is scheduled to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2028. Digital Realty said KIX15 will be the fifth data center on the Osaka-area campus and will bring its Japan portfolio to 10 facilities with about 220 MW of aggregate IT capacity when completed. Those capacity figures describe planned infrastructure, not committed customer usage or available capacity today.
AI workloads are changing data center requirements because dense compute systems can require more power, cooling and network connectivity than conventional enterprise deployments. Digital Realty said KIX15 will support hybrid cooling technologies, a design choice aimed at accommodating different high-density configurations rather than tying the site to a single cooling approach.
The company is framing KIX15 as part of its Kansai AI Infrastructure Co-Creation Project, which combines the campus expansion with domestic and international connectivity and work with telecommunications and technology partners. It did not identify individual customers for the new facility or disclose their expected deployments, power commitments or equipment configurations.
For enterprise teams, a new colocation site is useful only if it connects reliably to the services and environments their applications already use. Digital Realty said customers at KIX15 will have access through its ServiceFabric orchestration and interconnection platform to network providers, cloud services in Japan and its wider data center footprint. The company said this is intended to let customers expand high-power infrastructure while maintaining connectivity with existing IT environments.
That connectivity claim is significant because AI deployments often combine dedicated compute, private data sources, cloud services and external networks. The announcement does not provide network latency figures, service-level terms, carrier lists, security architecture or details about how enterprise customers will provision interconnection. Those factors will determine whether a specific deployment can meet performance and governance requirements.
KIX15 follows the earlier opening of Digital Realty’s NRT14 facility in Chiba, which the company said is among the first in Japan to obtain DGX-Ready Data Center certification. KIX15 has not been described as carrying that certification. It should not be assumed that the sites have identical configurations or that any particular AI hardware platform will be supported.
The project shows how AI infrastructure expansion is becoming a facilities and connectivity issue as much as a server-procurement decision. If delivered on schedule, KIX15 would add a new high-density option in the Osaka region. Enterprises considering the site will need more detail on power allocation, cooling support, interconnection, security and commercial terms before treating the construction start as an operational capacity increase.
Construction timing is also separate from customer readiness. A facility can be structurally complete before its power systems, cooling equipment, carrier connections and customer cages are commissioned for a particular deployment. The company did not disclose a phased delivery plan, so the fourth-quarter 2028 target should be treated as its stated start-of-operations objective rather than a guarantee of immediately usable capacity.