A consortium of 5 companies led by NEC announced that its demonstration project for a regionally distributed data center using an APN had been selected for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' fiscal 2026 "Watt-Bit Collaboration-related Demonstration Project." The demonstration will run in Tochigi Prefecture from August 2026 through February 2027, verifying distributed inference and GPU resource sharing.
A consortium of 5 companies led by Nippon Electric Company (NEC) announced that its demonstration of a locally produced and locally consumed data-distribution platform using regionally distributed data centers and an APN had been selected for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' fiscal 2026 "Watt-Bit Collaboration-related Demonstration Project."
The demonstration will connect GPU servers distributed across multiple locations in the region via an APN and verify GPU resource sharing among businesses. The consortium aims to enable real-time AI processing within the region, make effective use of limited computing resources and increase the added value of regional content.
The 5 companies will conduct the demonstration in a live field in Tochigi Prefecture from August 2026 to February 2027. Three regional businesses in Tochigi will be connected by optical fiber, and an APN using NEC's SpectralWave WX series will be built.
The consortium plans to conduct real-time inference on game footage of the Tochigi Golden Braves by combining video-recognition AI with LLM technology. It will also verify automatic optical-path optimization and dynamic switching functions for disaster scenarios.
Through the demonstration, the 5 companies will evaluate the effectiveness of distributed data-center operations and GPU resource sharing, and consider deployment in other regions and applications in the local-government sector.