Ryobi Systems Plans Third Okayama Data Center Building for Water-Cooled AI Infrastructure

Ryobi Systems is evaluating a third building for its Okayama Cloud Center as it seeks to accommodate water cooling and greater available electrical capacity for AI and GPU deployments.

The company operates two Ryobi-IDC data-center buildings in Okayama. Their current infrastructure supports high-density air-cooled racks of approximately 15–20 kW per rack, an IT-load capability that applies to the existing air-cooled environment rather than to the proposed third building. Customer GPU servers, including NVIDIA H100 systems, are already operating at the site.

However, Ryobi Systems said full-scale water cooling is difficult to implement in the current first and second buildings. The planned third building is intended to address both water-cooling requirements and sufficient available power capacity. The company is considering allocating part of a floor in the new facility to a water-cooled zone, while also pursuing an environment in which GPU servers and conventional IA servers can be colocated.

The strategy is not focused on attracting operators of very large GPU fleets used to train giant models. Instead, Ryobi Systems is targeting regional organizations and enterprises using AI in operational workflows. It also identifies demand from customers that need colocation and managed services for legacy systems as older retail data centers are closed.

For the wider market, the project could indicate a gradual regional-data-center upgrade path for AI workloads: limits on air-cooled rack density may drive new-build capacity designed around liquid cooling and stronger power availability. Regional operators may compete less on GPU-campus scale than on proximity, managed services, legacy-system hosting and low-latency delivery.