SoftBank will be the first to receive Nvidia chips with the Blackwell architecture. The Japanese company will implement these chips in a new supercomputer.

Since its unveiling early this year, the market has been waiting for the new Blackwell chips. Companies see the product as an attractive option for generative AI and accelerated computing. The GPUs contain 208 billion transistors and feature a new version of the Transformer engine, which should improve inference and training for LLMs and Mixture-of-Experts models.

The first chip in the Blackwell series, the GB200, is scheduled to ship this year. SoftBank is first up, while cloud providers like Microsoft hope to receive Blackwells soon. Production may ramp up in the first quarter of next year so that more companies get their hands on the chips. After that, new versions of the Blackwell chips are expected.

Japan’s most powerful supercomputer

SoftBank is the first to receive the latest Nvidia equipment, so the company’s ambition is to build Japan’s most powerful supercomputer. This is an ambitious endeavor, considering Japan is already among the top 10 most powerful supercomputers worldwide. The supercomputer will be used to develop generative AI and will be available to research institutions and companies in Japan upon completion.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has shown increasing interest in AI in recent months. In late September, it was leaked that SoftBank would invest half a billion dollars in OpenAI. Last summer, it also acquired British AI chipmaker Graphcore.

https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/126186/first-nvidia-blackwell-ai-chips-ship-to-softbank/