Digital Realty opened NRT14 in April 2026, the third facility at its NRT campus in Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture, part of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The campus total IT power is approaching 100 MW. NRT14 supports high-density colocation up to 150 kW per rack, hybrid liquid and air cooling, and holds DGX-Ready certification, making it one of the first facilities in Japan to carry that designation. The building is a joint venture between Digital Realty and Mitsubishi Corporation, operating as MC Digital Realty.
150 kW per rack is not a theoretical spec for future hardware. It is the current requirement for a dense Nvidia GB200 NVL72 deployment. A facility that cannot support that density is not a facility where serious AI inference or training infrastructure gets placed. NRT14 is designed from the start to handle what the current GPU generation actually requires, which is still not standard for colocation capacity in the Asia-Pacific region.
Operator: MC Digital Realty (50/50 JV, Mitsubishi Corporation and Digital Realty). Location: Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture, Japan (Tokyo metro). Campus trajectory: approaching 100 MW total IT power. NRT14 capacity: up to 150 kW per rack. Certifications: DGX-Ready (one of Japan's first). Cooling: hybrid liquid and air. Previous campus facilities: NRT10 (2021), NRT12 (2024). Digital Realty network: 300+ data centers across 55+ metros globally.
Japan has been slower to build AI-ready data center capacity than the US, but the underlying demand drivers are real: domestic hyperscaler activity, sovereign AI investment, and the concentration of Japanese enterprise IT modernization in the Tokyo metro region. Regulatory frameworks in Japan have historically been more predictable than in some other Asia-Pacific markets, and the grid situation, constrained but workable, is more stable than in markets where power availability is the primary bottleneck.
The Mitsubishi Corporation partnership is structurally important. Japanese enterprise data center procurement runs heavily on relationships and established supply chains. A JV that gives Digital Realty access to Mitsubishi's corporate network is not a minor distribution advantage in that market.
Hybrid liquid and air cooling is the correct architecture for a facility that needs to serve both legacy air-cooled colocation customers and new AI-dense deployments in the same building. A facility that committed entirely to liquid cooling would limit its addressable market to AI and HPC workloads. A facility that committed entirely to air cooling cannot serve the 150 kW per rack requirement at all. The hybrid architecture is the commercially rational choice for a colocation operator serving a mixed customer base during the transition period.
At 150 kW per rack, the liquid cooling infrastructure has to be designed in from the start. CDU placement, coolant distribution manifolds, floor penetrations, and the secondary heat rejection loop all need to be in the facility specification before construction, not identified as a retrofit after a customer request arrives. The DGX-Ready certification requires demonstrating that the facility can actually support the hardware, not just claim it can. That certification process forces operators to validate the full thermal and power stack before the first GPU chassis gets racked.
NRT14 is one data point in a pattern. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Australia are all seeing increased colocation investment from operators who need AI-ready capacity in Asia-Pacific and cannot build it fast enough in the US to serve regional demand. The cooling specifications in those facilities are being set now, liquid-ready from the ground up. Operators who are building or evaluating Asia-Pacific colocation capacity in 2026 and not specifying hybrid liquid capability are building to a standard that will be obsolete before the facility reaches its target utilization.