Contract Manufacturing | 堺, 21 August 2024 — The Last Sheet of Glass, and the Computers That Moved In

The last large television panels came off the tenth-generation line at 堺 on 21 August 2024. Sharp had announced the shutdown on 14 May that year, with a net loss of ¥149.98 billion for the year to March which it put down to the big-display business. 堺ディスプレイプロダクト had run the plant since 2009. Hon Hai's founder took a personal stake in that subsidiary in 2012, and the group bought Sharp itself four years later. Chinese panel makers had built newer, larger fabs through that period and the price of a television panel never recovered. The plant was the largest liquid-crystal works in the world and it could not be made to pay. What happened next is the interesting part, and it did not involve panels. In June 2024 Sharp and SoftBank signed a memorandum to put an artificial-intelligence data centre on about 440,000 square metres of the site, close to 60 per cent of it, with a power capacity above 150 megawatts. In March 2025 SoftBank contracted to buy roughly 450,000 square metres of land and 840,000 square metres of buildings for about ¥100 billion, targeting operation during 2026 and eventually more than 250 megawatts. KDDI took a smaller parcel in April 2025 and moved faster. Its 大阪堺データセンター opened on 22 January 2026 in a four-storey building of about 57,000 square metres, filled with NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 racks and cooled with liquid. KDDI put the conversion at roughly six months against the three years a data centre usually takes, and said the reason was the plant itself: the substations, the chilled water and the structure were already in place. That is the lesson of this site. A generation-ten fab is a very large shed with an industrial grid connection and cooling designed to remove heat continuously, which is most of what a computing hall needs. There is a loop in it too. The listed arm of the same group, 工業富聯 in Shanghai, builds cloud and server hardware of the kind these halls are filled with. From the public road at 匠町 the plant still reads SHARP in red on white, the sign above a wall with no glass moving behind it. The photograph was taken from that road. Photo: L26, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.