Taking another step after becoming the 7th company in the world to reach a trillion dollar market cap, NVIDIA has announced its partnership with SoftBank for driving generative AI applications in Japan.

SoftBank’s goal is to build 5G/6G applications with generative AI on NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip. These superchips will be used in the data centres that the company is planning  to build across Japan, enabling generative AI and wireless applications on a “multi-tenant common server platform, which reduces costs and is more energy efficient”, as explained by the company.

Leveraging NVIDIA’s MGX reference architecture through GH200 Superchips, SoftBank is planning to create breakthroughs in autonomous driving, AI factors, AR, VR, and even digital twins. Apart from AI, the company is also seemingly wanting to invest in the omniverse. 

CEO of SoftBank, Junichi Miyakawa, said that the era where society coexists with AI is incoming, and SoftBank aims to provide next-generation social infrastructure for a super-digitalised society in Japan.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said, “NVIDIA Grace Hopper is a revolutionary computing platform designed to process and scale-out generative AI services.” NVIDIA has been benefitting from the AI race the most all this while by providing hardware services to OpenAI, and now even SoftBank joins in.

SoftBank’s Pursuit of AI

The company has decided to move away from its defensive approach in AI, to cautious offence. SoftBank recently reported a total loss of $32 billion through their SoftBank Vision Fund. Most of the investments through this fund were AI and robotics focused startups. SoftBank’s Robotics arms has also been an industry leader when it comes to delivering industry grade robots. 

In recent news, SoftBank Corporation set up a new AI-focused entity with a specific focus on building a product similar to ChatGPT. Miyakawa has gathered 1,000 people from the company to build a Japanese version of ChatGPT. “We are dead positive on ChatGPT,” said Miyakawa.

This was just after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pushed the Japanese government to build frameworks for the development of generative AI as early as possible. This is also at the same time when OpenAI’s founder, Sam Altman decided to visit Japan to speak to the Prime Minister about building their office in the country.