The investment, the company's largest in its 46 years of operation in Japan, will be used to train three million people in AI technology and set up a Microsoft Research Asia laboratory in Tokyo.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said he sees more opportunities for cooperation with the United States on next-generation computer chips.

Server operators are expanding their data center and cloud center deployments globally to support the surge in AI applications and workloads following the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Amazon's (AMZN-US) cloud unit is investing $10 billion in Mississippi and $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia in data centers in those regions. Google is building a $1 billion data center outside London.

Microsoft's Azure, Alphabet's (GOOGL-US) subsidiary Google Cloud and Amazon AWS are the world's top three cloud computing companies.