Google Inzai data center, Inzai, Chiba

Google's first data center in Japan is in Inzai, a city in Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo, and Google opened it in March 2023. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced the Inzai data center in October 2022 as part of a $730 million investment in Japanese infrastructure running from 2021 through 2024, which also paid for the Topaz subsea cable linking Japan with the west coast of Canada.

Before Inzai, Google's cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka ran in colocation buildings operated by partners such as Equinix, DCD reported. Pichai said the data center would give people in Japan faster, more reliable access to Google's tools and services and support economic activity and jobs. Google cited a skilled local workforce and good digital infrastructure among its reasons for choosing Inzai.

Inzai is crowded with data centers. The area around Chiba New Town Chuo and Inzai Makinohara stations on the Hokuso Line is known as the data center Ginza, and the city and Chiba Prefecture told Jiji Press they had not gone out to recruit data centers, pointing instead to firm ground, low flood and earthquake risk and the 40-kilometer distance from central Tokyo. The city's fixed asset tax revenue rose from 7.9 billion yen in fiscal 2015 to 12.6 billion yen in fiscal 2022, according to Jiji. Tokyo Electric Power Company Power Grid estimated that data center demand in the Inzai area would grow to about eight times the whole area's late-2010s load by the early 2030s, and began building a new Chiba Inzai substation in August 2021. The build-out has started to meet resistance: when a six-story, 52.7-meter data center was planned beside Chiba New Town Chuo station, Mayor Kengo Fujishiro wrote that a data center was not the right facility for that spot, and residents of a neighboring apartment building raised concerns about lost sunlight, Nikkei reported. City officials told Nikkei there was little they could do to stop a private project on private land, and about 50 complaints about the view and noise reached the city.

Fujishiro has said his top job is to attract industries other than logistics and data centers, and that he wants city rules for development next to residential areas. Those rules would be set by Inzai's city government; Google's own site is not among the disputed projects.