Financial markets once had clear centers of gravity—New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore. Each era had its “world’s number-one market,” a place where capital, people, and rules converged. But today’s financial world is fragmented. Regulation and geopolitics have dispersed activity, and the idea of a single location one must watch has nearly disappeared.
If the world seeks a new center, what will it be? I believe the answer is the “information market.”
By information market, I do not mean a marketplace for trading data. It is a composite system: computational power, data, algorithms, the infrastructure that runs them, the people who operate them, and the rules that guarantee trust. When the choice of where to train an AI model—and under which legal and cultural framework to operate it—becomes a source of significant economic value, the information market will rival or surpass the importance of financial markets.
From this perspective, Japan cannot be excluded.
It is a stable rule-of-law nation with minimal risk of arbitrary seizures or retroactive regulations. Its power grid is remarkably reliable, with extremely low outage rates. Natural disasters occur, yet recovery is fast—earning Japan a reputation as a place where “things return to normal.” Additionally, Japan still retains a manufacturing foundation capable of designing and producing hardware, including semiconductors.
Taken together, these characteristics make Japan uniquely qualified as a place to “entrust information.”
Viewed through the lens of an information market, Japan has the right to stand at the “center.” Its position—neither the United States nor China—can be a geopolitical weakness, but also a strength when acting as a neutral infrastructure provider. Japan also has the institutional calmness to redesign rules around data ownership and privacy. The challenge is that its potential remains constrained by a Tokyo-centric mindset.
A Japanese information market cannot be built by focusing on Tokyo alone.
What is required is a shift: assuming that local cities must hold computational power. Until now, the role of local regions was to attract people and companies. From this point forward, they must be reframed as entities that attract computation and data. This is not a competition for population but a competition for information and processing.
Japan has many regions with renewable energy, surplus electricity, and land. Many of them enjoy cooler climates and access to water, which are favorable for cooling infrastructure. With proper planning for disaster risk, these regions can host mid-scale data centers and edge nodes—allowing each locality to own computational power.
This would create a distributed domestic information market that exists alongside, not beneath, Tokyo-centric cloud structures.
For local cities, possessing computational power is not merely about installing servers.
Services such as autonomous driving, drone logistics, and remote medicine depend on ultra-low latency and local trust. Japan’s regions—low population density, stable infrastructure, and defined geography—are ideal as real-world testbeds. If the computational layer behind these services resides locally, then each region becomes a site of the information market.
A similar structure appears at the level of individual homes. As I wrote in the 3LDDK article, the idea of embedding small-scale generation and computing into houses transforms residential units into local nodes. When aggregated at the town level, these nodes form clusters; when interconnected across municipalities, they become regional clouds.
Rather than relying entirely on centralized hyperscale clouds, local cities gain autonomy through computational power.
Financial history offers a useful analogy. Financial centers were places where capital, talent, and rules concentrated. Future information markets will concentrate computational power, data, and governance. But unlike finance, information markets will be physically distributed.
Networks of data centers in local cities—linked through invisible wiring—will collectively form a single “Japan Market.” From abroad, this appears not as a dispersed system but as a coherent, trustworthy platform.
The critical question is not “Where should we place data centers?” but “How should we design the system?”
Merely placing servers in local regions is insufficient. Market design must weave together electricity, land, and data flows while clarifying revenue distribution, risk ownership, and governance. Only then can Japan move from being a location for data centers to being the rules-maker of the information market itself.
Japan as an information market, and local cities as holders of computational power—these two visions are, in truth, one picture.
A system in which regions contribute their own compute and their own data, forming a market through federation rather than centralization. Whether Japan can articulate and implement this structure will determine the country’s position over the next decade.
That, I believe, is the question now placed before us.