Japan's SoftBank is the first to receive NVIDIA's new Blackwell GPU design for its AI supercomputer, with plans to also use Grace Blackwell chips to "further its supercomputer" says NVIDIA.
In an AI event held in Tokyo, Japan on Wednesday, both SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang were in attendance. The two CEOs held a "fireside chat" at the event, with Jensen telling a story that Son once offered to lend him money to buy NVIDIA, as its value wasn't understood in the market at the time.
Jensen said, laughing: "He wanted to lend me money to buy NVIDIA. All of it. Now I regret not taking it".
- Read more: Japan's SoftBank kills plans for Intel to make AI chip to compete with NVIDIA, goes to TSMC
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- Read more: NVIDIA's new Blackwell-based DGX SuperPOD: ready for trillion-parameter scale for generative AI
The SoftBank CEO made an offer to Jensen a month before the Japanese giant acquired chip designer Arm, with the Japanese billionaire later building and selling a stake in NVIDIA and the attempted the sale of Arm to NVIDIA which saw regulatory issues everywhere.
In the end, we know the success of NVIDIA as it has become the world's clear leader in AI GPU technology.
