SoftBank Corp., a Japanese multinational investment firm, has teamed up with NVIDIA, an American multinational technology company, to create a new platform for generative artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G/6G applications. The platform is based on the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper™ Superchip and will be rolled out at new AI data centers across Japan.
SoftBank plans to build data centers that can host generative AI and wireless applications on a multi-tenant common server platform, which will reduce costs and be more energy efficient. This partnership will pave the way for the rapid deployment of generative AI applications and services worldwide.
President and Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Corp., Junichi Miyakawa, stated, “As we enter an era where society coexists with AI, the demand for data processing and electricity requirements will rapidly increase.
“SoftBank will provide next-generation social infrastructure to support the super-digitalized society in Japan.”
Furthermore, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, stated that the demand for faster computing and generative AI is causing a significant change in the design of data centers.
“NVIDIA Grace Hopper is a revolutionary computing platform designed to process and scale-out generative AI services. Like with other visionary initiatives in their past, SoftBank is leading the world to create a telecom network built to host generative AI services,” he added.
The new data centers will be more evenly spread out and will handle both AI and 5G workloads. This will enable them to operate more efficiently with lower latency and energy costs.
SoftBank is also looking into developing 5G applications for various industries, such as autonomous driving, AI factories, augmented and virtual reality, computer vision and digital twins.
