Nvidia has committed to a series of collaborations with SoftBank designed to accelerate Japan’s sovereign AI initiatives while also unlocking billions of dollars in AI revenue opportunities for telecommunications providers worldwide.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced that SoftBank is building Japan’s most powerful AI supercomputer using the Nvidia Blackwell platform and has plans to use the Nvidia Grace Blackwell platform for its next supercomputer.
Additionally, Nvidia revealed that SoftBank, using the Nvidia AI Aerial accelerated computing platform, has successfully piloted the world’s first combined AI and 5G telecom network — a breakthrough in computing that opens AI revenue streams potentially worth billions of dollars to telecom operators.
Nvidia and SoftBank also announced that, using Nvidia AI Enterprise software, SoftBank is aiming to create an AI marketplace that can meet the demand for local, secure AI computing.
This new 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.
Huang said that 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.
“Through our long collaboration with Nvidia, SoftBank is leading this transformation from the forefront,” said Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank. “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 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.
The company 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.
Further, working closely with Nvidia, SoftBank has achieved a technology milestone — the development of a new kind of telecommunications network that can run AI and 5G workloads at the same time, known by the industry as artificial intelligence radio access network, or AI-RAN.
This new breed of infrastructure has broad ecosystem support from the telecom industry, as it offers operators the ability to transform their base stations from cost centers into AI revenue-producing assets.
Through an outdoor trial conducted in the Kanagawa prefecture, SoftBank demonstrated that its Nvidia-accelerated AI-RAN solution has achieved carrier-grade 5G performance and was able to do so while using the network’s excess capacity to run AI inference workloads concurrently.
Traditional telco networks are designed to handle peak loads and, on average, have used only one-third of that capacity. With the common computing capability provided by AI-RAN, it is expected that telcos now have the opportunity to monetise the remaining two-thirds capacity for AI inference services.
Nvidia and SoftBank partners that contributed to the trial of SoftBank’s AI-RAN solution include Fujitsu and Red Hat.
