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JERA, Japan’s largest power company, plans to build a large gas-fired power plant in the United States equivalent in scale to a single nuclear reactor, supplying electricity to an artificial intelligence (AI) data center.
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), JERA plans to build a 1-gigawatt (GW) gas-fired power plant linked to a data center in the central United States, with a target startup in 2028 and an investment of 500 billion yen (about 4.75 trillion won), the newspaper reported Tuesday.
Nikkei said it was the first time a Japanese power company had built a dedicated power plant for a data center in the United States. The newspaper projected that the data center, intended for training large language models (LLMs), would involve investment in the tens of trillions of won and would be a large-scale facility even by U.S. standards.
JERA plans to supply power directly from the plant to the data center without going through the transmission grid. As data centers have recently been built around the world, demand for transmission grids has surged, and connections can take up to 10 years or more. Bypassing the transmission grid also offers the advantage of reducing power losses.
The Japanese government has agreed to build gas-fired power plants worth 17 billion dollars (about 25 trillion won) in Pennsylvania and 16 billion dollars (about 24 trillion won) in Texas through a second phase of investment in the United States totaling up to 73 billion dollars (about 109 trillion won).
Nikkei said gas-fired power plants were one of the core projects in the 550 billion dollar (about 845 trillion won) investment in the United States agreed upon in U.S.-Japan tariff negotiations, but that JERA’s project this time had a separate framework. If JERA expands its business in the United States, Japan would be able to build up additional results in the country, the newspaper reported.
JERA was established in 2015 when Tokyo Electric Power Holdings and Chubu Electric Power integrated their respective thermal power divisions, and operates 26 thermal power plants in Japan.
Meanwhile, Japan’s SoftBank Group, which is cooperating with OpenAI on the “Stargate” project, a U.S. plan to develop a national-scale mega data center, is also preparing to build a gas-fired power plant in Texas.