The Japanese government will give five companies, including telecom company KDDI, a total of 72.5 billion yen ($470 million) to fund efforts to develop artificial intelligence amid concerns about overreliance on US technology, Report informs via Nikkei Asia.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has selected KDDI, cloud service company Sakura Internet and others, and will fund up to half of their individual investments. Sakura will be the biggest beneficiary, receiving 50.1 billion yen in government aid, followed by for KDDI, which will get 10.2 billion yen.
High-performance computers are essential to develop generative AI, as it requires data processing on a vast scale. At present, Japanese companies rely on American companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for the necessary computing power.
Building supercomputers can cost up to billions of dollars. Securing graphic processing unit (GPU) chips, a crucial component, is another financial burden for the Japanese companies. Popular chips are in short supply as companies around the world scramble to buy chips such as the H100, designed by Nvidia of the US.
Tokyo will announce its funding plan in the near future, as it feels the need to strengthen Japan's AI development capabilities for economic security reasons. It also hopes government funding will help Japanese companies catch up to their US rivals, which have aggressively invested in AI supercomputers without government subsidies.