TOKYO/OSAKA — SoftBank Corp. plans to use a former Sharp LCD panel plant in Japan as a data center to operate artificial intelligence agents that will be jointly developed with U.S. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Nikkei has learned.
As soon as Friday, the Japanese telecoms company will sign a contract to acquire the facilities and part of the land at Sharp’s defunct TV liquid crystal display plant in the city of Sakai, in Osaka. The purchase price is expected to be about 100 billion yen ($676 million). SoftBank concluded that the site could procure enough electricity for the long term to operate an AI data center.
