NVIDIA and SoftBank To Pilot World's First Combined AI and 5G Network
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NVIDIA and SoftBank Corp. have announced a series of collaborations aimed at accelerating Japan's sovereign AI initiatives and solidifying its global technology leadership. The partnerships are also expected to unlock billions of dollars in AI revenue opportunities for telecommunications providers worldwide.
During his keynote at NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced that SoftBank is building Japan's most powerful AI supercomputer using the NVIDIA Blackwell platform. SoftBank also plans to use the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform for its next supercomputer.
NVIDIA also revealed that SoftBank, using 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 potentially generate billions of dollars in new revenue streams for telecom operators globally.
Additionally, NVIDIA and SoftBank announced that, using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, SoftBank is aiming to create an AI marketplace to meet the demand for local, secure AI computing. This service, which supports AI training and edge AI inference, positions SoftBank to become the AI grid for Japan, facilitating new business opportunities for the creation, distribution, and use of AI services across the country's industries, consumers, and enterprises.
"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."
SoftBank First to Receive Blackwell, Plans for Grace Blackwell
SoftBank is slated to receive the world's first NVIDIA DGX B200 systems, which will serve as the building blocks for its new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputer.
SoftBank plans to use its Blackwell-powered DGX SuperPOD for its own generative AI development and AI-related business, as well as that of universities, research institutions, and businesses throughout Japan.
Upon completion, SoftBank's DGX SuperPOD is expected to be Japan's most performant to date. Featuring NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, it is also ideal for the development of large language models.
In addition to its DGX SuperPOD, SoftBank plans to build another NVIDIA-accelerated supercomputer to run extremely compute-intensive workloads. Initial plans for the supercomputer are based on an NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform design featuring NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 multi-node, liquid-cooled, rack-scale systems that combine NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with power-efficient Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPUs.