NVIDIA and SoftBank Corp. are accelerating Japan’s journey to become a global AI powerhouse through a series of collaborations. During his keynote at NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, announced that SoftBank is building Japan’s most powerful AI supercomputer using the NVIDIA Blackwell platform. Additionally, SoftBank has successfully piloted the world’s first combined AI and 5G telecom network, unlocking billions of dollars in new revenue opportunities for global telco industry.
SoftBank is also creating an AI marketplace with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to meet the demand for local, secure AI computing. This new service will facilitate new business opportunities across Japan’s industries, consumers, and enterprises. Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank, emphasized that through their long collaboration with NVIDIA, SoftBank is leading the transformation from the forefront.
The collaborations are expected to drive growth across the telecommunications, transportation, robotics, and healthcare industries in ways that will greatly benefit humankind in the age of AI.
Accelerating Japan’s AI Journey with NVIDIA and SoftBank
The collaboration between NVIDIA and SoftBank Corp. aims to accelerate Japan’s sovereign AI initiatives, furthering its global technology leadership while unlocking billions of dollars in AI revenue opportunities for telecommunications providers worldwide.
Building Japan’s Most Powerful Supercomputer
SoftBank plans to build two NVIDIA-accelerated supercomputers, one featuring an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD design and the other based on an NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform. The former will be used for generative AI development and AI-related business, while the latter will run extremely compute-intensive workloads. These supercomputers are expected to be Japan’s most performant to date, ideal for developing large language models.
Achieving a Technology Milestone with AI-RAN
Working closely with NVIDIA, SoftBank has developed an artificial intelligence radio access network (AI-RAN) that can run AI and 5G workloads simultaneously. This new breed of infrastructure offers operators the ability to transform their base stations from cost centers into AI revenue-producing assets. The trial demonstrated carrier-grade 5G performance while using excess capacity to run AI inference workloads concurrently.
Monetizing Excess Capacity with AI-RAN
Traditional telco networks are designed to handle peak loads, but on average, they only use one-third of that capacity. With AI-RAN, telcos can monetize the remaining two-thirds capacity for AI inference services. NVIDIA and SoftBank estimate that telco operators can earn roughly $5 in AI inference revenue from every $1 of capex invested in new AI-RAN infrastructure.
Real-World Inference Applications on AI-RAN
SoftBank used NVIDIA AI Enterprise to build real-world AI inference applications, including autonomous vehicle remote support, robotics control, and multimodal retrieval-automated generation at the edge. All inference workloads were able to run optimally on SoftBank’s AI-RAN network.
Building an Ecosystem for AI Technology
SoftBank aims to build an ecosystem that connects the demand and supply of AI technology by using NVIDIA AI Enterprise serverless application programming interfaces and its in-house developed orchestrator. This enables SoftBank to dispatch external AI inferencing jobs to an AI-RAN server when computing resources are available, delivering localized, low-latency, secure inferencing services.
Shifting from Single-Purpose to Multi-Purpose Networks
The collaboration between NVIDIA and SoftBank marks a huge step toward AI-RAN commercialization, validating technology feasibility, performance, and economics. Shifting from single-purpose to multi-purpose AI-RAN networks can mean 5x the revenue for every dollar of capex invested.
Paving the Way for New Business Models
SoftBank’s ‘AITRAS’ is the first AI-RAN solution developed through a five-year collaboration with NVIDIA. It integrates and coordinates AI and RAN workloads through the SoftBank-developed orchestrator, enhancing communication efficiency by running dense cells on a single NVIDIA-accelerated GPU server. This AI-driven innovation is expected to pave the way for new business models in telecommunications, serving as a crucial factor in the transformation of mobile operators.
External Link: Click Here For More
