As information infrastructure becomes tied to national strategy, and both cloud and AI are increasingly framed within the context of geopolitics, nations are now faced with a decision: which information network to connect to, and on which compute infrastructure to build their society.
Many countries have effectively left that decision to Big Tech. The American cloud, or the Chinese cloud—not so much a matter of choosing, but of being absorbed into one or the other. In parts of Europe, there are now efforts to build “sovereign” systems, but even those often amount to little more than a reshuffling of dependencies.
This is something I felt directly, through discussions I had at CERN.
In this context, I’ve been thinking about the potential of a third option: Japan.
Not because Japan is technologically superior. In terms of compute resources, latent energy reserves, software competitiveness—Japan may in fact be at a relative disadvantage.
Even so, Japan holds a unique kind of value: neutrality, transparency, and trust—layers that aren’t easily quantified.
It’s a rule-of-law nation, with high disaster resilience, cautious about global-scale data usage, and with a strong social security layer. These form the foundation of what might be called national-level “assurance.”
In training AI models, it’s no longer just about how much you can compute. Where the data is processed, and under what ethical standards, now directly impacts long-term value. Ethics itself has become part of the infrastructure.
That’s why I believe that choosing Japan—specifically, the combination of its compute infrastructure and its legal framework—may increasingly hold structural significance. As companies, organizations, and even individual developers begin to consider “where to run” their projects, Japan may come to be seen as a politically and culturally “acceptable” nation.
Just as, in the world of finance, Switzerland, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore once played such roles—Japan, or more precisely, Japan’s regional cities, could become a new center.
Perhaps the world is already beginning to seek out this option called Japan.