NVIDIA and SoftBank announced a partnership on a pioneering platform for generative AI and 5G/6G applications based on the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper™ superchip. The platform will be deployed by SoftBank in new distributed AI data centers across Japan.
To pave the way for rapid global deployment of generative AI applications and services, SoftBank will work with NVIDIA to build data centers capable of hosting generative AI and wireless applications on multi-tenant common server platforms . This reduces costs and provides more benefits. energy efficiency.
The platform uses the new NVIDIA MGX™ reference architecture with the Arm Neoverse-based GH200 superchip and is expected to improve performance, scalability and resource utilization for application workloads.
The new data centers will handle both AI and 5G workloads, more evenly distributed across the footprint than those previously used. This results in lower latency, significantly lower overall energy costs, and the ability to operate better at peak capacity.
SoftBank is looking to create 5G applications for autonomous driving, AI factories, augmented and virtual reality, computer vision and digital twins.
Virtual RAN for record-breaking throughput
NVIDIA Grace Hopper and NVIDIA BlueField®-3 data processing units accelerate software-defined 5G vRAN and generative AI applications without custom hardware accelerators or dedicated 5G CPUs. Additionally, NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switches powered by BlueField-3 provide precision timing protocols for 5G.
Based on published data on 5G accelerators, the solution delivers breakthrough 5G speeds in NVIDIA-accelerated 1U MGX-based server designs, delivering industry-leading throughput of 36 Gbps downlink capacity . Carriers have struggled to achieve such high downlink capacity using industry standard servers.
New reference architecture
NVIDIA MGX is a modular reference architecture that enables system manufacturers and hyperscale customers to quickly and cost-effectively build over 100 different server variations for a wide range of AI, HPC and NVIDIA Omniverse™ applications.
Incorporating NVIDIA Aerial™ software for high-performance, software-defined, cloud-native 5G networks, these 5G base stations enable operators to dynamically allocate computing resources, 2.5x more than the competition. of power efficiency can be achieved.
Mr. Junichi Miyagawa, President and CEO, SoftBank Corp.
As we enter an era in which AI and society coexist, data processing and power demand will increase rapidly. SoftBank will provide next-generation social infrastructure that supports Japan’s ultra-digital society. Our collaboration with NVIDIA will significantly improve infrastructure performance through the use of AI, including RAN optimization. It also hopes to help build networks of interconnected data centers that can be used to reduce energy consumption, share resources, and host various generative AI applications.
NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang
The demands of accelerated computing and generative AI are fundamentally changing the architecture of the data center. NVIDIA Grace Hopper is a revolutionary computing platform designed to process and scale out generative AI services. Like other visionary efforts in the past, SoftBank is a world leader in building telecommunications networks built to host generative AI services.
Arm CEO Rene Haas
The future of generative AI requires high-performance, energy-efficient computing like NVIDIA’s Arm Neoverse-based Grace Hopper superchip. Combining Grace Hopper with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs Will Enable New SoftBank 5G Data Centers to Run the Most Demanding Compute and Memory-Intensive Applications, Leap Forward to Software-Defined 5G and AI on Arm efficiency gains.
