Nvidia, the American technology company based in Santa Clara, California, has announced a series of collaborations with SoftBank Corporation aimed at accelerating Japan's sovereign AI initiatives. These partnerships aim to bolster Japan's global technology leadership and open up billions of dollars in AI revenue opportunities for telecommunications providers worldwide.

During the keynote address at the NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that SoftBank will be building Japan's most powerful AI supercomputer utilizing the NVIDIA Blackwell platform for its next-generation supercomputer. 

Huang further disclosed that SoftBank, leveraging the NVIDIA AI Aerial accelerated computing platform, has successfully piloted the world's first combined AI and 5G telecom network. This breakthrough in computing could unlock AI revenue streams worth billions of dollars for telecom operators.

NVIDIA and SoftBank have further announced that, by utilizing NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, SoftBank aims to establish an AI marketplace designed to meet the demand for local and secure AI computing. This new service will support AI training and edge AI inference, positioning SoftBank as the AI grid for Japan. It will facilitate new business opportunities for the creation, distribution, and use of AI services across various industries, consumers, and enterprises in the country.

“Japan has a long history of pioneering technological innovations with global impact,” said Huang. “With SoftBank’s significant investment in NVIDIA’s full-stack AI, Omniverse, and 5G AI-RAN platforms, Japan is leaping into the AI industrial revolution to become a global leader, driving a new era of growth across the telecommunications, transportation, robotics, and healthcare industries in ways that will greatly benefit humankind in the age of AI.”

“Countries and regions worldwide are accelerating the adoption of AI for social and economic growth, and society is undergoing significant transformation,” said Junichi Miyakawa. 
President and CEO of SoftBank. “Through our long collaboration with NVIDIA, SoftBank is leading this transformation from the forefront. With our extremely powerful AI infrastructure and our new, distributed AI-RAN solution ‘AITRAS’ that reinvents 5G networks for AI, we will accelerate innovation across the country and throughout the world.”