Ares-backed Ada breaks ground, but 300MW gap looms

Ada Infrastructure has broken ground on the third and final building at its TKW1 data center campus in Tokyo, an 11MW addition to two 10MW predecessors that brings the site to 31MW and, according to the company's LinkedIn post, marks its fifth project in Japan and its second Tokyo groundbreaking in four months. Work on the first building began in August 2023 and was scheduled to go live in May 2025; the second, started in May 2024, is expected to follow in 2027.

Ras Scollay, principal for revenue and product in APAC, called the ceremony the firm's third groundbreaking and its second in Tokyo in four months, adding that "Ada is truly moving at an unprecedented pace." The pace rests on a relatively young corporate structure: Ada was set up in 2023 by Singapore-based logistics real estate firm GLP to develop and hold its data center assets outside China, and Ares acquired it alongside GLP's other international assets the following year, making Ares the owner of the Japanese buildout.

Ada's stated ambition is roughly $12 billion over five years to deliver 900MW of data center capacity in Japan, but the published pipeline currently names five campuses totaling 600MW: four in Tokyo, designated TKW1, TKW2, TKE1 and TKE2, plus one in Osaka. On three of those Tokyo sites the numbers are explicit: TKW2 is planned at 295MW across eight five-story buildings by 2026, TKE1 at 66MW across three four-story buildings by 2026, and TKE2 at 190MW across four four-story buildings starting in 2027, while Ada is also developing projects in the UK and Brazil.

That leaves roughly 300MW of Japanese capacity—a third of the target and roughly the size of another TKW2—absent from the named pipeline. Grid access has become the binding constraint of the digital buildout, with power and interconnection rather than shovels now setting the schedule, so Ada's two Tokyo groundbreakings in four months show it can secure sites and start construction but say little about whether the unallocated 300MW will ever be built. The next round of site announcements will reveal how much of that remaining capacity comes with actual interconnection rights behind it.