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Jensen Huang has made a major announcement! NVIDIA and SoftBank are collaborating to build AI infrastructure in Japan, hitting the restart button for

Update time : 2024-11-14 18:17:38

On November 13th, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, announced at the NVIDIA Japan Summit that the company would collaborate with SoftBank to build AI infrastructure in Japan, including the largest AI factory in Japan.

Masayoshi Son, the former chairman and president of SoftBank, said, "SoftBank is investing heavily in the construction of data centers in Japan, hitting the'restart button' for Japan's technological development. Japan can't afford to miss this round of AI development. We need the infrastructure."

Moreover, according to the latest news, Japan's new Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, has promised to provide new support worth 10 trillion yen (equivalent to approximately 470 billion yuan in Chinese currency) for Japan's semiconductor and AI industries in an attempt to keep up with the global investment boom in cutting-edge technologies.

According to a draft plan, the new funding framework will be separate from the previous special fund worth around 4 trillion yen and will be incorporated into the upcoming stimulus package aiming to generate an economic impact of approximately 160 trillion yen.

However, in the capital market, affected by the collective adjustment of US chip stocks, Japan's chip stocks also saw a pullback in the Japanese stock market on Tuesday. Lasertec dropped by more than 4%, while Advantest and Tokyo Electron fell by 3.2% and 2.8% respectively. Today (Wednesday), the trend of Japan's chip stocks was mixed. As of the time when this report was written, Tokyo Electron rose by more than 3%, Renesas Electronics dropped by more than 2%, Lasertec fell by 0.30%, and Advantest rose by 0.20%.

NVIDIA's Collaboration with SoftBank
On November 13th, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, announced at the NVIDIA Japan Summit that the company would collaborate with SoftBank to build AI infrastructure in Japan, including the largest AI factory in Japan.

Masayoshi Son, the founder of the SoftBank Group, said, "SoftBank is investing heavily in the construction of data centers in Japan, hitting the'restart button' for Japan's technological development. Japan can't afford to miss this round of AI development. We need the infrastructure."

Jensen Huang stated that SoftBank is using the NVIDIA Blackwell platform to build Japan's most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer and plans to use the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform for its next supercomputer.

Furthermore, NVIDIA revealed that SoftBank has successfully piloted the world's first combination of artificial intelligence and 5G telecom networks using the NVIDIA AI Aerial accelerated computing platform, which is a breakthrough in the computing field and has opened up a potential multi-billion-dollar artificial intelligence revenue stream for telecom operators.

NVIDIA and SoftBank also announced that SoftBank aims to use the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to create an AI marketplace that can meet local secure AI computing needs. This new service, which supports artificial intelligence training and edge artificial intelligence inference, positions SoftBank as Japan's AI grid, creating new business opportunities for industries, consumers, and enterprises across Japan to create, distribute, and use artificial intelligence services.

Junichi Miyakawa, the president and CEO of SoftBank, said, "Countries and regions around the world are accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence to promote social and economic growth, and society is undergoing a major transformation. Through the long-term cooperation with NVIDIA, SoftBank is leading this transformation. With our extremely powerful artificial intelligence infrastructure and our new distributed AI-RAN solution 'AITRAS', which reshapes 5G networks for artificial intelligence, we will accelerate innovation across the country and around the world."

It is reported that SoftBank will obtain the world's first NVIDIA DGX™ B200 system, which will serve as the building block for its new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ supercomputer. SoftBank plans to use its Blackwell-based DGX SuperPOD for its own generative artificial intelligence development and AI-related businesses, as well as for universities, research institutions, and enterprises across Japan.

In addition to the DGX SuperPOD, SoftBank also plans to build another NVIDIA-accelerated supercomputer to run extremely computationally intensive workloads. The preliminary plan for this supercomputer is based on the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform design, which adopts the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 multi-node, liquid-cooled, rack-level system, combining the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU with the energy-efficient NVIDIA Grace™ CPU based on Arm.

Japan's "Heavy Investment"
On the evening of November 11th local time, Japan's new Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, announced an ambitious investment plan. Ishiba proposed that the Japanese government would provide financial support of at least 10 trillion yen by the fiscal year 2030 to boost the semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries.

At the press conference that evening, Ishiba said, "We will formulate a new assistance framework in an attempt to attract more than 50 trillion yen in public and private investments over the next 10 years." This plan will be incorporated into the comprehensive economic package determined in November and will be provided in the forms of subsidies, investments by government-affiliated institutions, and loan debt guarantees for private sector financial groups. Ishiba emphasized that the government will not issue "deficit-covering bonds" to fund this initiative.

According to a draft package obtained by the media, the new funding framework will be separate from the previous special fund of approximately 4 trillion yen and will be outlined in the upcoming economic stimulus plan, aiming to generate an economic impact of approximately 160 trillion yen.

The 4 trillion yen special fund was proposed by the cabinet under the leadership of former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. This budget was aimed at revitalizing the chip industry and included an allocation of 920 billion yen for the local chip company Rapidus, whose goal is to mass-produce advanced logic chips by 2027. The newly announced additional 10 trillion yen in funding has a broader range of uses and aims to help Japan narrow the gap with countries that provide significant support for chips globally.

Currently, countries are competing to invest more in AI-driven semiconductor capabilities, which policymakers now consider crucial for economic security. For example, the US President Joe Biden's "CHIPS and Science Act of 2022" promised to provide chip manufacturers with a total of $39 billion in grants, as well as $75 billion in loans and guarantees, plus tax credits of up to 25%.

Based on the need to drive economic growth, the Japanese government is also increasing its support for this industry. According to the above draft plan, global chip demand is expected to triple to 150 trillion yen over the next 10 years. The framework aims to provide more than 10 trillion yen in public assistance through outsourcing, financial support, and legislative measures to enhance the predictability for private companies. From the perspective of economic security, the Japanese government believes that it is necessary to establish the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor field. If subsidies are provided on a year-by-year basis, the predictability will be low. Therefore, it will switch to multi-year planned support.

Yoji Muto, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, said on Tuesday that the Japanese government will not raise taxes to fund the new framework, adding that the details are still being finalized. Ishiba pointed out that he will discuss the financing of the plan with various departments, but he will not use deficit-financing bonds to pay for these measures.

SoftBank's Accelerated Layout in AI
On November 12th, SoftBank released its performance report for the second fiscal quarter (the third quarter of the natural year) ending in September of fiscal year 2024 and for the first half of the year. Data shows that SoftBank's revenue in the first half of the year increased by 7% year-on-year to 3.15 trillion yen, achieving a net profit of 1.18 trillion yen, far exceeding the market expectation of 295 billion yen. SoftBank's Vision Fund turned its profit around in the second fiscal quarter, with a profit reaching 373 billion yen, mainly boosted by the IPO boom in India.

Currently, Masayoshi Son, the founder of the SoftBank Group, is making a big push into the fields of artificial intelligence and semiconductor investment. Son is raising funds for entering the fields of artificial intelligence and related hardware by selling assets in the Vision Fund's investment portfolio. In May this year, the company announced an annual $9 billion artificial intelligence investment plan.

Although Son had hinted at the possibility of launching a new series of Vision Funds, the possibility of launching a third or fourth fund no longer exists at present. Instead, most of SoftBank's current investments are carefully planned by the holding company and bypass the Vision Fund. Son's new pursuit is partly inspired by the success of Arm. Since its listing last year, Arm's market value has soared to approximately $150 billion, and SoftBank holds 90% of the company's shares.

Recently, SoftBank contributed $500 million to a round of financing for OpenAI. Previously, in June, SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 announced an investment in the US artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI. In addition, Graphcore, a chip design company acquired by the SoftBank Group, is adding 75 new jobs globally, with the number of employees set to increase by 20%. This move highlights SoftBank's ambition in the semiconductor industry. The new positions announced by Graphcore cover the fields of silicon design and data center engineering.

At the end of October, Son said in an interview with the media that the trend of continuous spending in the field of artificial intelligence will only accelerate in the next few years, which will benefit NVIDIA and its GPU chip business, which has been the driving force behind most of the progress in artificial intelligence. "I think NVIDIA is underestimated because the future (of artificial intelligence) is much broader," Son said at the Future Investment Initiative Summit in Saudi Arabia. Son is bullish on artificial intelligence because he believes that "super artificial intelligence" will be achieved by 2035.

Artificial intelligence is widely regarded as an AI system as intelligent as humans, and Son defines super artificial intelligence as an AI system that is 10,000 times more powerful than the human brain. Son said that to achieve this level of artificial intelligence, enterprises will need more than 200 million GPU chips and invest a total capital expenditure of $9 trillion.

Son said that considering the huge profits that potential super artificial intelligence may bring, it might be a worthwhile deal. "I think it's still very reasonable capital expenditure. $9 trillion is not too much, maybe too little," he said. Son also said that if super artificial intelligence replaces 5% of GDP within 10 years, it may bring profits of up to $4 trillion per year.

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