Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New York Times; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
- SoftBank is the first to buy Nvidia's Blackwell chips, the companies said Wednesday.
- The chips will power a supercomputer in Japan.
- The collab comes amid skyrocketing demand for Nvidia chips as companies scramble to secure supplies.
SoftBank Group is the first customer to use Nvidia's Blackwell chips, which will be used to develop an artificial intelligence supercomputer in Japan.
The companies plan to build the system — which they call Japan's most powerful supercomputer — in early 2025. SoftBank said it will use the Blackwell-powered computer for generative AI development and as a resource for research institutions and companies across the country.
"Together we're going to build Japan's largest AI factory," Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said at the company's AI summit in Tokyo on Wednesday.
The two companies also announced deals to provide AI services on 5G networks and to create an AI marketplace for local compute.
The announcement highlights Japan's efforts to reclaim its place as a tech and innovation hub amid lagging AI adoption. AI is an especially big opportunity for Japan as it struggles with an aging society, labor shortages, and overwork. In a statement, Nvidia said the supercomputer will help accelerate Japan's plans to adopt AI in telecommunications, robotics, and healthcare.
The partnership comes amid skyrocketing demand for Nvidia's chips as companies and countries scramble to secure supplies to improve their AI capabilities. As one of the few players in this space, Nvidia has a stronghold on anyone looking to accelerate their business or economy using AI models.
In August, Nvidia sparked worries that Blackwell chips would be delayed by two to three months, pushing shipments to the first quarter of 2025 instead of later this year. The delay would affect customers including Meta, Microsoft, Google, and smaller cloud firms. On an August earnings call, Huang promised that the company would ship out billions of dollars worth of Blackwell GPUs by the fourth quarter.
With the world's biggest companies on Nvidia's customer list, SoftBank's procurement of the first Blackwell platform reflects Huang's relationship with the Japanese investor and its billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son.
Son was an early investor in Jack Ma's Alibaba and acquired European chipmaker Arm for $32 billion in 2016. He's going all-in on AI, with investments across the world — including in OpenAI.
During the summit, Huang laughed with and hugged Son. The Nvidia cofounder reminded audiences that SoftBank was once his largest shareholder and that Nvidia would "not be here today" if not for Japan and its first AI supercomputer.
Last month, Nvidia hosted a similar AI summit in Mumbai where Huang met with Indian conglomerate leader Mukesh Ambani to discuss the "extraordinary opportunity" AI poses for India.