Nvidia and SoftBank have announced they are collaborating on several projects, which include building an AI supercomputer in Japan on the chip designer’s Grace Blackwell platform.
Announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the company’s AI Summit Japan, the supercomputer is expected to be the most powerful AI system in the East Asian country.
As part of the collaboration, SoftBank will receive the world’s first Nvidia DGX B200 systems, which will be used to build the Nvidia DGX SuperPod supercomputer. The system will also feature Nvidia AI Enterprise software and the company’s Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
SoftBank plans to use its Blackwell-powered DGX SuperPod for its own generative AI development, as well as that of universities, research institutions, and businesses throughout Japan.
In addition to the DGX SuperPod, SoftBank is also planning to build an additional supercomputer featuring Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system. The racks are comprised of liquid-cooled GB200 GPUs, each of which features one Grace CPU and one B200 AI GPU for up to 90 teraflops of FP64 compute.
It is estimated that an NVL72 GB200 machine with a 72 B200 graphics processor will require around 120kW of power.
Japan plays host to world’s first live 5G AI-RAN pilot program
Elsewhere at Nvidia’s AI Summit Japan, it was revealed that Nvidia and SoftBank have also jointly launched the world’s first combined AI and 5G telecom network based on Nvidia’s AI Aerial accelerated computing platform.
The new kind of telecommunications network can run AI and 5G workloads at the same time and is known by the industry as an artificial intelligence radio access network, or AI-RAN. In a joint statement, the companies said they conducted an outdoor trial in the Kanagawa prefecture of Japan and were able to achieve carrier-grade 5G performance while simultaneously using the network’s excess capacity to run AI inference workloads.
“Japan has a long history of pioneering technological innovations with global impact,” said Huang. “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 in ways that will greatly benefit humankind in the age of AI.”
Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank, added: “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.”
