SoftBank Group and OpenAI are teaming up to develop and sell an "advanced enterprise AI" dubbed Cristal intelligence, which will also be used by SoftBank across its companies.
Cristal intelligence will enable businesses to integrate their systems and data in a way that is customized to the company and create AI agents. SoftBank is set to spend $3 billion annually deploying Cristal intelligence across its companies and will offer OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise to its employees across the group.
Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., said: “This initiative will not only transform the way SoftBank Group operates but also revolutionize the way companies work in Japan and around the globe."
SoftBank and OpenAI are also forming a joint venture (JV) - SB OpenAI Japan - which will sell Cristal intelligence to other Japanese companies. Each founder will take a 50 percent stake in the JV.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, added: "This partnership with SoftBank will accelerate our vision for bringing transformative AI to some of the world’s most influential companies - starting with Japan."
OpenAI will provide its AI research, technology, and engineering support to the JV, and SoftBank Corp. its sales staff and engineers. Chip designer Arm, which is majority-owned by SoftBank, will offer its compute platform to help meet the computational demands of Cristal intelligence.
Cristal intelligence will be based on OpenAI's o1-series of AI models that are capable of reasoning. OpenAI claims the models are set to evolve this year into "agents" which can do tasks independently such as generating financial reports, drafting documents, and managing customer inquiries.
SoftBank Group companies - including Arm and SoftBank Corp. - will have priority access in Japan to OpenAI's latest and most advanced models.
SoftBank Corp. says it will use Cristal intelligence to automate more than 100 million workloads and will work with SB OpenAI Japan to build a secure environment for additional data training to build AI agents.
Arm will also integrate Cristal intelligence AI technology across its operations.
Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, said: "Arm is partnering with OpenAI and SoftBank to drive unprecedented productivity across the global technology ecosystem, setting new benchmarks and building a future in which AI agents span from edge to cloud on Arm. We are at the forefront of the AI revolution, and our high-performance, energy-efficient compute is going to be critical to advancing the Cristal intelligence.”
Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank Corp., added: “To realize our long-term vision of building next-generation social infrastructure with the aim of implementing AI into society, SoftBank Corp. has been promoting various initiatives, including the buildout of distributed AI data centers and Japan top-level AI computing platforms. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing how we can transform Japan’s businesses through our partnership with OpenAI.”
Last year, SoftBank announced it was planning a 150MW data center at a former liquid crystal display (LCD) panel-making site in Osaka, Japan. The data center is expected to launch this year, and has the potential to expand to 400MW in the future.
The company is also working with Nvidia to build an AI supercomputer in Japan using Nvidia's Grace Blackwell platform.
OpenAI and SoftBank are major investors in The Stargate Project, announced by OpenAI in January of this year. Both companies have pledged $19 billion to the project which expects to see $500 billion invested in AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years, $100bn of which will be deployed "immediately."
This month has also seen SoftBank investing $50m in cryptomine data center firm Cipher Mining, giving it the option to acquire an undeveloped 300MW data center site in Texas that Cipher owns - though it has not been stated if this will be part of the Stargate project. The first Stargate data centers are set to be located in Texas.
