NVIDIA is leading the charge to make Japan a 'sovereign AI' leader, but what exactly is sovereign AI, which NVIDIA advocates as essential for an AI-based nation?



On May 15, 2024, NVIDIA announced that with subsidies from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and cooperation with major domestic cloud companies, it will promote the construction of Japan's generative AI infrastructure and strengthen the foundation for '

sovereign AI, ' which utilizes domestic data with domestic AI.

NVIDIA to Help Elevate Japan's Sovereign AI Efforts Through Generative AI Infrastructure Build-Out | NVIDIA Blog
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/japan-sovereign-ai/

NVIDIA supports Japan's sovereign AI efforts by building generative AI infrastructure | NVIDIA press release
https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000466.000012662.html

In this announcement, NVIDIA revealed its intention to build AI infrastructure in collaboration with cloud providers certified by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, including GMO Internet Group, Sakura Internet, KDDI, and SoftBank.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has announced plans to provide subsidies totaling more than 100 billion yen to support Japanese companies participating in this initiative and to ensure the stability of 'cloud programs,' the various elements that make up the cloud. The number of certified companies is expected to continue to increase.



NVIDIA also says that this initiative will position Japan as a leading country aiming to adopt the concept of 'sovereign AI.'

Sovereign AI, sometimes referred to as 'sovereign AI,' refers to the ability of a nation to create AI using its own infrastructure, data, distribution networks, and human resources, and is considered an essential concept for circulating the enormous economic benefits generated by AI within the country.

Sovereign AI has two aspects: physical infrastructure and data infrastructure. NVIDIA, which has strengths in producing GPUs for AI, is expected to exert its presence especially in the hardware side.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang visited Japan in December 2023 and met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and political and business leaders, where he announced the company's intention to prioritize the supply of NVIDIA GPUs to Japan to advance the development of AI infrastructure, as well as its intention to partner with Japanese companies to build a semiconductor production network.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says he wants to give priority to supplying GPUs to Japan - GIGAZINE



'AI factories will become the foundation of the modern economy around the world,' Huang told reporters at the press conference, emphasizing that 'AI factories,' next-generation data centers specialized in processing computationally intensive AI tasks, are essential to feeding massive amounts of data into AI.

Japanese tech giants are already accelerating their move toward AI adoption, with SoftBank announcing on May 10, 2024 that it will invest 150 billion yen in capital expenditures, with up to 42.1 billion yen in subsidies, to deploy NVIDIA accelerated computing, including Blackwell , NVIDIA's GPU architecture for generative AI, to build AI infrastructure at multiple locations across the country.

Huang is planning to visit Japan, Canada, France, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam from 2023 to 2024, and has pledged to build AI infrastructure in each country.

in Note, Posted by log1l_ks