The Japanese government has reportedly decided to start laying the groundwork for the development of generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) in the country by paying for half of the US$ 100 million supercomputer.
The new supercomputer is being built in Hokkaido via Japanese cloud service provider Sakura Internet, to begin service as early as next year. The Osaka-based Sakura Internet is one of Japan’s biggest cloud service company with data centers in Tokyo, Osaka and Hokkaido, with the latter powered by renewable energy. The development of the new supercomputer is expected to improve the company’s computing power by three times higher than the current level for AI development.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has agreed to support the cost to build the machine under the condition that Sakura Internet allow local startups to gain access to the supercomputer’s processing capabilities at low rates. In turn, it’s expected that the variety of access will help the training of the supercomputer in order to process enormous amount of data on the large-scale language model.
Sakura Internet’s supercomputer will contain more than 2,000 graphics processing units from Nvidia that’ll boost processing capacity by more than double than that of the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, a supercomputer operated by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
The move is part of Japan’s grand plan to tackle its lack of domestic computing ability necessary for the development of GenAI models. Japan expects GenAI to contribute to economic growth and devised plans to lessen its dependence on foreign GenAI models. This is to withstand various geopolitical security risks, highlighted in recent years with the prolonged Russia’s war on Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic and West-led restrictions on semiconductors that have exposed vulnerabilities in the advanced tech sector.
Earlier this month, Japan released a revised action plan stating the government’s support to boost R&D for GenAI development in Japan for its longer term plan to enable the tech’s application in improving various areas of medicine, education, finance, manufacturing and administrative work.
The Japanese government also called for appropriate set of regulations and guidelines to prevent risks to privacy, disinformation and copyright infringements amid increased foreign collaboration in developing GenAI models. In May, Japan’s Softbank Corp announced it teamed up with Nvidia on a platform for GenAI and 5G/6G applications to be introduced at Softbank’s new AI data centers in Japan.
