Nintendo plans new Kyoto tech center, completion set for 2029

Nintendo plans to complete a new Technology Development Center in Kyoto by March 2029, a nine-story building with one basement level and an estimated construction cost of ¥121 billion. The facility, at 11-1 Hokotate-cho in Minami-ku, will cover 49,305.87 square meters and is set up as a new research and development base for software and hardware, with development servers and other R&D infrastructure.

For Nintendo’s developers, designers, QA staff, localization teams and business groups, the scale matters as much as the schedule. A 6,084.00-square-meter building footprint and a 67.570-meter height point to a substantial expansion of the company’s technical capacity in Kyoto, not a cosmetic office refresh. The company says the center is meant to support further investment in R&D and help it keep creating reasons for consumers to choose its entertainment offerings, which is a direct reminder that Nintendo still sees hardware and software as one pipeline, not separate businesses.

The project has been years in the making. Nintendo first moved on the land in 2022, when it acquired the city-owned site after being selected as operator on April 12, 2022 through a Kyoto City public proposal process that began on December 8, 2021. The land includes the former Startup Support Factory site and the former western site of the Materials and Disaster Prevention Center. Nintendo had initially referred to the building as Corporate Headquarters Development Center, Building No. 2, a tentative name that fit its headquarters-area redevelopment plan.

The scope has grown repeatedly. Nintendo originally announced the building in 2022 as a roughly 12-story structure with about 38,000 square meters of floor area and a target completion date of December 2027. In 2023, the company said it was upscaling the plan and aiming for 2028, saying the change reflected long-term staff growth needs. Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo’s president, said development resources required per piece of software are increasing, a line that lands differently inside a company where each release depends on tightly coordinated engineering, art, testing and localization work.

The new center also fits Nintendo’s longer corporate pattern. Founded in Kyoto in 1889, the company says it has sold more than 870 million hardware units and more than 6.1 billion software units worldwide. That scale is part of why a larger Kyoto R&D base reads as a long-horizon investment signal: Nintendo is building more room for the people and systems that keep its hardware and software integrated, and it is doing it at the center of its home city.