Investing.com -- SoftBank (TYO: 9984 ) Corp. has announced plans to repurpose a former Sharp (OTC: SHCAY ) LCD panel plant in Japan into a data center for artificial intelligence (AI) operations, in partnership with OpenAI. The AI agents to be run at this facility will be jointly developed by the two companies, according to Nikkei .

The Japanese telecoms firm is expected to sign a contract as soon as Friday to acquire the facilities and a portion of the land at the now-defunct Sharp TV liquid crystal display plant, located in the city of Sakai, Osaka. The expected purchase price for the site is around 100 billion yen ($676 million).

SoftBank has determined that the location could generate sufficient electricity in the long term to operate an AI data center. This investment in the Japanese facility, one of the country’s largest, could approach $7 billion.

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