AI (artificial intelligence) chip giant Nvidia will strengthen AI cooperation with Japanese manufacturers such as SoftBank. On December 4, local time, Nvidia CEO Huang Jensen held talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo. After the meeting, Huang Renxun said in an interview that Nvidia plans to cooperate with Japanese companies including SoftBank to develop generative AI.
In addition to SoftBank Group, Nvidia will also cooperate with cloud service providers Sakura Internet Inc. and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co. (NTT). Huang Renxun believes: "With the combination of generative AI and Japanese manufacturing expertise, the future of robotics will be completely changed in Japan."
Huang Renxun also said that Fumio Kishida hopes that Nvidia can provide Japan with as many GPUs (graphics processing chips) as possible: "The market demand is very high, but I promised the Prime Minister that we will do our best to prioritize Japan's GPU needs."
Huang Renxun also mentioned that Fumio Kishida is very interested in the topic of "how Japan can seize the opportunity in the era of generative AI." The two also discussed how the next generation of AI will bring opportunities to the local industry: "The semiconductor industry that Japan has begun to grow will also be able to produce its own GPU. Countries like Japan are realizing that you need to own your own data, build your own AI factory, and produce your own AI intelligence."
According to foreign media reports, more and more Japanese manufacturers are beginning to use generative AI to improve their competitiveness, especially after the chatbot ChatGPT, owned by the emerging American AI giant OpenAI, set off a global AI craze. With the support of the Japanese government, SoftBank established a new company with about 1,000 employees in March this year to develop a Japanese version of ChatGPT. In July this year, Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC) launched a Japanese generative AI service. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company also plans to launch a generative AI platform for enterprise users in March next year.
In addition, the Japanese government just passed an additional budget two weeks ago and decided to use about 2 trillion yen in subsidies for the chip field to strengthen Japan's position in the global semiconductor field. Part of the funds will be used to support TSMC and Japan's high-end chip company Rapidus.
On May 28 this year, NVIDIA and SoftBank announced that they are collaborating to create a groundbreaking platform for generative AI and 5G/6G applications based on NVIDIA's GH200 Grace Hopper super chip, and will introduce Grace Hopper super chips into SoftBank's new distributed data centers across Japan.
In 2020, Nvidia attempted to acquire Arm, a British chip design company owned by SoftBank Group. But after strict scrutiny by regulators and opposition from antitrust regulators, the deal eventually fell through in 2022. In October this year, it was revealed that Nvidia was using Arm's technology to develop chips and had begun trying to produce central processing units (CPUs) for PCs to run Microsoft's Windows operating system, which may pose a challenge to Intel's leadership in the PC processor market.