Nvidia and SoftBank Corp. announced a comprehensive strategic collaboration on November 13, 2026, during the Nvidia AI Summit in Tokyo. SoftBank confirmed it will become the inaugural global technology operator to receive and deploy Nvidia's next-generation DGX B200 enterprise computing platforms and the partners will construct Japan's most powerful sovereign artificial intelligence supercomputer. Engineering teams completed live-network field trials of the world's first combined 5G Artificial Intelligence Radio Access Network (AI-RAN).
The sovereign supercomputer will leverage Nvidia's Blackwell semiconductor architecture, with a primary computing cluster integrating hundreds of liquid-cooled Nvidia DGX B200 platforms. Each system houses eight Nvidia B200 Tensor Core GPUs alongside dual 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, and once commissioned, the facility will provide exaflops of dense artificial intelligence computing to Japanese research institutions, universities, and commercial enterprises. SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son confirmed the infrastructure will be managed by SB Intuitions, SoftBank's specialized computing subsidiary. The unit is pretraining a 70-billion-parameter indigenous Japanese multimodal foundation model designated Sarashina mini and will distribute infrastructure-as-a-service computing across regional enterprises.
Deploying the Nvidia AI Aerial software platform, SoftBank conducted field verifications in Kanagawa Prefecture, operating the world's first functional commercial AI-RAN deployment. Architecture replaces dedicated single-purpose baseband processors with general-purpose GPU acceleration, enabling cellular base stations to process 5G telecommunications traffic alongside real-time edge artificial intelligence inference workloads. Field metrics demonstrated the AI-RAN framework enables providers to monetize over 40% of surplus base station computing capacity during off-peak periods, and excess compute can be allocated toward autonomous vehicle telemetry, robotic monitoring, and edge computer vision algorithms without degrading mobile network performance. SoftBank executives indicated plans to deploy AI-RAN across hundreds of thousands of cellular installations nationwide.
Trading data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange showed SoftBank Corp. shares surged nearly 8%. Nvidia shares gained nearly 2% during pre-market trading on the Nasdaq.
