Ponsfu Industrial and Asahikawa City Sign MOU, Planning to Build Hokkaido’s First AI Compute Center
Taiwan innovation investment company PENG SI FU Industrial Co., Ltd. formally signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOU) with the government of Asahikawa City, Hokkaido, Japan, in July, to jointly establish the Asahikawa AI Compute Center. The center will be the first facility in Hokkaido centered on artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, symbolizing a new chapter in Taiwan–Japan cooperation in cutting-edge technology.
Since being elected mayor of Asahikawa in 2021, Kansuke Imazu has taken “Together with You” as his governing philosophy, committed to promoting citizen participation, municipal transparency, digital transformation and regional revitalization. This cooperation with Ponsfu Industrial demonstrates his long-term planning and execution in making Asahikawa the flagship base of a smart city in northern Japan. At the signing ceremony Imazu stressed: “Asahikawa City will fully provide legal and compliant land and stable, competitive power resources, and give maximum support on taxation and operating conditions, to help the AI compute center land successfully.” At the same time, Asahikawa City also brought academic representatives to witness this historic moment; guests in attendance included Professor Asamizu Satoshi of Asahikawa City University and Huang Gengsi, Vice President of the Asahikawa National College of Technology, among others.
Ponsfu Industrial focuses on global AI compute infrastructure, green-energy technology, medical innovation and international venture investment, and continues to expand its compute footprint in Japan, the Czech Republic, Singapore and Taiwan. It is committed to using the power of capital to drive technological innovation and become a key driver of industrial upgrading. Chun-yu Yang, Chairman of Ponsfu Industrial, said: “Asahikawa has natural conditions for developing green AI. We will integrate resources and technology from Taiwan, Japan and the United States with a global vision to build a future-oriented AI computing center. This is not only an investment but a commitment of value and trust.”
This signing represents not only cooperation between Taiwanese and Japanese public and private sectors but also a new milestone of “industry, government and academia jointly building a future industrial ecosystem.” In the future the three parties will jointly advance AI curriculum development, technology transfer, industry-academia internships and AI-application demonstration sites. According to the plan, the Asahikawa AI Compute Center is expected to formally begin construction in April 2026; the first phase will use Supermicro’s latest-generation rack systems and evaluate adopting NVIDIA H200 or B200 GPUs, to provide a high-performance, low-latency and scalable computing platform.
The compute center will in future serve core scenarios such as “large-scale AI model training and inference,” “smart manufacturing, medical AI, speech and image recognition,” “the needs of AI startups and academic and research units in Japan and abroad” and “the digital transformation and smart-application deployment of local companies.” After completion it is expected to form a three-in-one technology ecosystem covering compute, data and applications, and to draw on the advantage of the cool climate to promote a model of low-carbon, green-energy computing.
Li Fuzhong