As AI's appetite for compute keeps growing, a single urban data center hits a hard physical wall — not racks, but power and land. No amount of expansion at one site solves it. It's a challenge the whole world shares, and one that hits especially hard in Japan, where land is scarce.

So instead of expanding one site, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS distributed GPUs across Japan. Over a wide-area L2 network built on IOWN APN (All-Photonics Network) technology, we operate eight data centers — more than 2,000 km from Sapporo to Fukuoka — as a single Kubernetes cluster. But a fast network alone isn't enough. The real challenge is making that distributed capacity usable as one: multiple tenants in secure isolation, existing workloads running as-is, with the feel of a single site. We made that real with cloud native technologies — above all, KubeVirt.

What matters most is who built it: engineers from Japan and Korea, brought together by open source. Because Kubernetes and KubeVirt gave us a shared language, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS and SK Telecom could design as equals across a national border. Our takeaway: a challenge the whole world shares can be addressed on the common ground of CNCF, where companies and countries co-create a solution together. This one was built by engineers in Japan and Korea — and from here in Japan, we want to take this distributed architecture to a world facing the same wall.