NTT to Warm Shrimp Farm With Data Center Waste Heat Near Tokyo

NTT will pilot waste heat from a Tokyo-area data center to warm Pacific white shrimp tanks starting next year, with the trial running until March 2028. IMT Engineering and NTT Docomo Business announced the joint project this week under the name "Construction of a Waste Heat Utilization Type Land-Based Aquaculture System."

The deployment sits at an NTT Docomo Business data center in or near Tokyo. Recovered heat will warm the rearing water for Pacific white shrimp raised on land adjacent to the facility.

NTT set out the goal plainly: to "demonstrate a new option for utilizing waste heat from data centers, which has previously had limited uses due to its relatively low temperature, by using it for food production."

Who does what?

Four companies share the work:

• IMT Engineering designs the land-based aquaculture system.
• NTT Docomo provides the data center.
• Hibiya General Equipment handles design and construction of waste heat recovery and heat supply equipment.
• NTT Green & Food runs the aquaculture operation and evaluates how much data center waste heat cuts production costs.

The partners want two things: verified cost-reduction numbers and a business model other data centers can copy. That's the real deliverable, not the shrimp.

What does this change for heat reuse?

Low-grade waste heat has always been the hard problem. Data center exhaust is too cool for most industrial uses, so operators vent it. Food production changes the equation, because aquaculture needs steady warmth rather than high temperatures. If the trial proves shrimp farming can absorb that heat economically, every urban data center gains a template.

NTT Green & Food, established in 2023 with regional fisheries operator Regional Fish, already produces and sells eco-friendly fish, shellfish and feed algae, primarily via land-based aquaculture.

A government-backed program

The project forms part of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government initiative funding demonstration projects for waste heat and other unused heat from data centers. Two others stand out:

• KDDI and ElleThermo are deploying a self-powered temperature sensing system that generates electricity even from low-grade heat of around 20–40°C.
• Kratwerk Co. and Tokyu Construction are using waste heat from a small modular data center under a railway overpass for server cooling.

Tokyo is clearly shopping for use cases. Waste heat is abundant; buyers are scarce.

NTT's data center footprint

NTT Docomo operates Nexcenter facilities at seven sites around Tokyo, plus Yokohama, two in Osaka and one in Kagawa. Abroad, it runs one facility in Shanghai and two in Hong Kong. Each is a potential future host for the aquaculture model if the trial succeeds.

Precedent elsewhere

Agricultural heat reuse is not new. Equinix does it in Paris. In Sweden, EcoDataCenter partners with circular economy firm Wa3rm. Block Heating in the Netherlands co-locates a facility with a tomato greenhouse. In Japan itself, the White Data Center cultivates eels with waste heat. Green Mountain warms a lobster farm in Norway, and Data4 has trialed algae growing in France.

What's different here is the systematic framing. Tokyo's program tests multiple heat-reuse schemes side by side, and NTT's shrimp pilot explicitly targets a replicable business model rather than a one-off showcase.

The verdict arrives by March 2028: cost data first, shrimp second.