TOKYO: Japan’s industry ministry said Friday it will provide up to 42.1 billion yen in subsidies to SoftBank Corp. for building a supercomputer for use in developing artificial intelligence technology.

The aid is part of an effort by the ministry to promote the development of homegrown generative AI technology, which requires computing power that can process massive data.

SoftBank will use the aid to help finance procurement of Nvidia Corp. graphics chips for the development of a high-performance supercomputer. The company will allow startups working to develop generative AI technology to use the supercomputer.

The ministry last month said it would provide subsidies to similar supercomputer development projects by KDDI Corp. and others.

Those subsidies are expected to help the country achieve the government’s goal of increasing its computing capacity to 60 exaflops by the end of fiscal 2027, according to the ministry. An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least one quintillion floating point operations per second.

JIJI Press