TOKYO -- AirTrunk plans to triple its total data center investment in Japan to as much as $30 billion over the next five years, as the Australian operator expands to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure in Asia.

"The prospect of demand in Japan ... will be massive," CEO Robin Khuda told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Wednesday, adding that AirTrunk remained "very bullish" on the market.

The planned investment underscores that Japan has become one of Asia's largest data center markets, driven to date mainly by cloud computing. But Khuda said AirTrunk was increasingly seeing strong demand for AI workloads, including model training and the inference stage of answering queries.

AirTrunk also plans to double its current 530 megawatts of committed capacity in Japan to over 1 gigawatt.

One major expansion at its TOK1 campus in Inzai, east of Tokyo, is a $1 billion investment in liquid-cooling technology, bringing the total committed investment across its existing Japanese campuses to over $9 billion. It is targeting $27 billion to $30 billion in total investment within five years.

Khuda said higher construction and financing costs had made Japan a relatively expensive market, but geopolitical stability and strong domestic demand continued to attract global tech companies. Customers are "happy to pay a premium" to deploy capacity in Japan compared with less stable markets, he said.

AirTrunk, acquired by U.S. private equity group Blackstone in 2024, has 22 data center campuses with about 3.3 GW of operating and planned capacity across seven markets, and focuses primarily on serving major tech firms and hyperscalers.

Khuda said constraints on data center development in the U.S., where large projects have faced growing resistance from local communities, could shift more investment toward the region. "The biggest beneficiary would be Asia," he said.

Data center demand in the Asia-Pacific region stood at 28 GW in 2025, or about one-third of the global total, behind North America's 43% share, with capacity expected to triple by 2030, according to consultancy McKinsey & Co.

In Japan, planned AI data centers are expected to more than quadruple the country's capacity to 4.9 GW by 2033 from 1.1 GW at the end of 2025, according to a Nikkei survey.

AirTrunk sees Australia, Japan, Malaysia and India as its four main hubs for expansion. Khuda also described South Korea as an "interesting market" with significant potential, although near-term efforts would remain concentrated on existing hubs.

The company is also considering more regional locations within Japan as electricity becomes harder to secure around major cities. AI training workloads in particular do not always need to be located close to Tokyo, Khuda said.

Despite strong demand, Khuda acknowledged that opposition to data centers is spreading in Asia as larger facilities put pressure on power grids, water and land. The industry's "social license to operate" would increasingly determine which projects were allowed to proceed, he said.

Communities are "quite rightly" asking whether large data centers provide enough local benefits to justify their use of resources, he added. Tougher standards could raise barriers for less-experienced developers and force operators to demonstrate greater benefits for surrounding communities.

Khuda pointed to Malaysia's southern state of Johor one of Asia's fastest-growing data center markets, where development accelerated after neighboring Singapore tightened limits on new facilities He said around 90% of AirTrunk's workforce at its Johor campus was hired locally, and close to a fifth of project spending went to local suppliers. The company is also investing in a large recycled-water project there.

"I wouldn't say the government [or] community will put a brake on data centers," Khuda said. Instead, they would increasingly determine "the quality of data center" operators they wanted as neighbors.