2024 Capacity Surge
NTT DATA announced in January 2025 that it added 10 new data centers across the globe during 2024, delivering more than 370 megawatts of capacity to meet climbing demand from AI and cloud services, a volume that equals the annual electricity use of roughly 250,000 homes. The rollout represents the single‑largest annual expansion for the company’s Global Data Centers division since it began publishing tallies in 2018, underscoring the speed at which enterprise AI workloads have scaled and prompting competitors to accelerate their own site pipelines. Revenue from colocation services rose 12 percent year‑on‑year, a gain the company attributes directly to the new facilities coming online mid‑year, and the margin improvement has already been reflected in the quarterly earnings release. Chief executive Doug Adams said the company is "laser‑focused on building for the future while delivering the scalable, secure and sustainable infrastructure enterprises need today," positioning the expansion as a response to market pressure rather than a publicity move.
Investment and Land Acquisitions
NTT DATA earmarked $2.9 billion in capital expenditure during 2024, a sum that funded new land purchases in Berlin, Frankfurt, Chicago and Hillsboro, Oregon, with the intention of adding more than 800 MW of total IT power capacity by the end of 2026. Those sites are projected to contribute more than 800 MW of total IT power capacity by the end of 2026, according to the company’s regulatory filing, a figure that includes both new construction and retrofits of existing halls. The largest single acquisition is a 68.5‑acre plot in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, which will become one of the biggest data‑center campuses in the APAC region with an anticipated 290 MW of capacity, positioning the location as a hub for regional cloud providers. The Johor Bahru site will debut direct‑liquid‑cooling systems from day one, a design choice driven by the heat densities of upcoming AI servers and by the company’s goal to reduce per‑rack energy use. desk coverage
Liquid Cooling for AI
In 2024 NTT DATA supported more than 200 MW of AI workloads running on liquid‑cooled infrastructure, a figure the company expects to double by 2026 as more customers demand density‑optimized halls and as the number of GPU‑intensive training jobs climbs. The technology reduces the energy needed per teraflop by roughly 30 percent compared with traditional air‑cooling, a margin that translates into meaningful cost savings for operators running thousands of GPU nodes and also lowers the overall carbon footprint of each training run. By placing cooling loops directly beside the rack, NTT DATA avoids the overhead of chilled‑air distribution rooms, which in turn frees up floor space for more compute and simplifies cable management for high‑density server rows. Company engineers say the approach also lowers the overall PUE (power usage effectiveness) of the facility, moving the data center closer to the industry benchmark of 1.5 or below and thereby improving overall energy efficiency.
Sustainability Gains
NTT DATA reports a 26 percent reduction in greenhouse‑gas emissions and a 15 percent increase in renewable‑energy share, bringing the total to 51 percent across its Global Data Centers operations in FY 2023 compared with FY 2022, a performance that outpaces the industry average of roughly 38 percent renewable share. The emission drop stems from a mix of higher renewable‑energy procurement, more efficient power‑usage effectiveness (PUE) metrics, and the adoption of liquid‑cooling systems that lower the overall electricity demand of each rack, resulting in a measurable decline in Scope 2 emissions. By hitting the 51 percent renewable target, NTT DATA joins a small group of data‑center operators that have moved beyond the 30 percent benchmark that many peers still struggle to cross, setting a new point of reference for the sector. The company says the sustainability push is integrated into every new land acquisition, with future sites required to meet a minimum 40 percent renewable‑energy share in their first year of operation and to report progress quarterly to the board.
Market Context and Challenges
Independent forecaster IDC projects that total installed IT power capacity in data centers worldwide will rise from roughly 142 GW in 2024 to more than 260 GW by 2029, a compound annual growth rate fueled almost entirely by AI‑related workloads and by the expanding footprint of edge‑computing sites. NTT DATA’s $10 billion capex plan through 2027 positions the firm to capture a considerable slice of that growth, even as Equinix and Digital Realty announce their own waves of land purchases, creating a competitive scramble for strategic locations. Power‑grid stress is already visible in markets such as Singapore, where regulators have capped new data‑center connections, and in the United States, where utility companies are re‑evaluating transmission upgrades to handle the projected surge, prompting some operators to seek secondary power feeds. NTT DATA’s emphasis on liquid cooling and renewable‑energy sourcing is an attempt to stay ahead of those constraints, but the industry as a whole still faces a steep learning curve, especially as new cooling technologies scale beyond pilot projects.
Outlook and What's Next
Looking ahead, NTT DATA says it will add roughly 10 data centers per year through 2027, each sized to incorporate the latest cooling and efficiency tricks and to meet emerging regional regulatory requirements on power density. For enterprise IT leaders, the takeaway is clear: the next round of infrastructure decisions will likely hinge as much on cooling strategy and power contracts as on compute performance, especially when AI model size continues to balloon. In practice, companies that pair AI ambitions with purpose‑built data‑center partnerships may avoid the bottlenecks that have begun to slow rivals, securing better uptime and lower operational expenditure. As the 2025 fiscal year unfolds, all eyes will be on whether NTT DATA’s bold spending translates into measurable head‑room for the AI‑driven economy, or merely adds another layer to an already crowded market, shaping the competitive market for years to come. The regional data center boom signals a fundamental shift in how cloud services are deployed worldwide.
Independent analysts note that the bulk of new capacity will likely land in Asia during 2026, with Jakarta and Bangkok emerging as probable priority markets. This clustering reflects the region’s cheap land, growing renewable supply, and the need to place compute close to end users, a trend that is reshaping where companies spend capital on physical infrastructure.