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MC Digital Realty – not a DJ, not a burger, not at risk of soil liquefaction

It's a joint venture between Mitsubishi and Digital Realty to do bit barns in Japan

Digital Realty and Mitsubishi Corporation have entered a joint venture to build big bit barns in Japan.

The two companies will each toss an existing data centre into the new company, which is called “MC Digital Realty”. Next comes a plan to build more data centres, for two reasons.

First is an attempt to tap into the cloud market: the two companies feel Japan lacks the kind of facilities that cloud operators want, so it'll build them.

Secondly, the pair believe that Japanese companies want to consolidate privately run bit barns into larger and more efficient managed data centres. Which is just what they plan to build.

Left unsaid is that Google, AWS, Azure and IBM all have a presence in Japan, as does Equinix. Japan also has local players like NTT, Fujitsu and others.

All are of course potential customers for MC Digital Realty. As are the many software-as-a-service companies that need hyperscale facilities and always like to serve local markets with low-latency servers and in-jurisdiction storage. Which is why the new company's announcement emphasises the fact that Digital Realty brings a substantial customer base to the party, while Mitsubishi touts its “significant expertise in the Japanese real estate and IT markets.”

There's no word on when the two will break ground on new facilities. For now they're working with Using Digital Realty’s Saito data centre, which boasts 93,000 square feet of space and 7.6 megawatts of capacity, plus Mitsubishi Corporation’s Mitaka facility where twin data centres offer over 40,000 squares meters of space and 1.3 megawatts.

Mitsubishi is proud of the Mitaka facility's resilience: it says the data centres are “ … situated on solid ground of the Musashino Plateau where risk of soil liquefaction would be minimal.”

“Moreover, given its position over 20 kilometers from coastal waters and an elevation of 53 meters, the building would remain safely out of the path of tsunami, and would not likely be impacted by traffic restrictions if a major disaster were to strike.” ®

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