SoftBank-Led Japan 'AI Alliance' Sees 30 Companies Considering Investment

Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) reported on May 28 that around 30 companies are considering investing in a Japanese artificial intelligence (AI) development company established by SoftBank. In addition to existing investors from the automotive and electronics sectors, manufacturers in fields such as chemicals, robotics, and logistics are also expected to participate, aiming to build a Japan-specific AI ecosystem.

Currently, about 30 companies, including Asahi Kasei, Yaskawa Electric, and Fujitsu, as well as major firms in heavy industry and transportation, are involved in discussions. Initially, around 10 companies are expected to decide on investments by next month, with each company likely to make a small investment of several tens of millions of yen.

Reuters Yonhap News

The AI development company established by SoftBank, "Japan AI Foundation Model Development," counts SoftBank, NEC, Honda, and Sony Group as its key shareholders. Each of these four companies holds a stake of more than 10%. Major banks such as Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, along with Japan Steel Works and Kobe Steel, are also participating.

SoftBank has determined that it faces limitations in competing alone with major U.S. tech companies and has therefore decided to collaborate with Japanese firms to develop industry-specialized AI. According to Nikkei, Japan currently lags behind the U.S. and China in developing AI models, but plans to leverage the vast data accumulated in its manufacturing sector to strengthen its competitiveness in the field of physical AI.

Through these efforts, the company aims to develop a large-scale AI with a performance parameter of 1 trillion by 2027. Subsequently, it plans to evolve into a multimodal AI capable of processing various types of information such as images and audio simultaneously by 2029, and further advance to an AI that can integrate and process real-world data such as weight, temperature, and distance in the early 2030s. The models developed in this way will be made available to the participating companies, enabling them to build industry-specific AI models and services.

To safely utilize manufacturing site data for AI training, SoftBank will build Japan's largest data center on the grounds of the Sharp Sakai Plant, with full-scale operations scheduled to begin in 2028. The facility will house computational infrastructure equipped with 100,000 units of NVIDIA's high-performance H200 AI chips, and the total infrastructure investment is estimated at around 1 trillion yen.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.