Diary 2023-06-16

I was slammed because I have an unexplored junior boost meeting tomorrow and a meeting at 9pm!

We are pleased to announce that we have decided to work with NVIDIA to significantly enhance our high-intensity computing services ‼️

The investment of 13.5 billion yen for 2,000 H100 units, including facilities and networks, is quite a commitment, but we have been approved for the government's cloud program, and half of the cost will be subsidized.

I have repeatedly said that the country must be able to provide GPU infrastructure at low cost, and I am very happy to be in a position to lead it myself in this way.

Incidentally, I believe that Japan is a competitive environment for AI research and startups, since there are few regulations on AI in Europe, there is strong opposition to AI in the U.S. because it may take away people's jobs, and China has become a completely controlled society. I believe that Japan is a competitive environment for AI research and startups because of its declining birthrate and aging population and shortage of workers.

Prices are still inexpensive, it's an easy place to live, and it's really possible that things like foreign AI startups will come to Japan in the future.

During the Web 3.0 boom, people moved overseas because they disliked the Japanese tax system, but I hope that Japan will be the center of attraction during the AI boom.

By the way, GPU is important for generation AI, but it is also important that the energy does not emit CO2, and in that respect Hokkaido is rich in natural energy, and of course the Ishikari Data Center is 100% renewable energy. I believe that it is more reasonable to use electricity in the northern land rather than sending it to Tokyo.

Note that although the hardware investment is mainly discussed in this article, we would like to provide the service as a GPU instance of Sakura Cloud, and the project is not about hardware, but about service and software.

Perhaps if we were talking about simply building a data center, we would not have received such a grant, and we would like to use this as an opportunity to focus on middleware, frameworks, and API development for AI.

We still can't compete with AWS, GCP, Azure, etc., but we still want to make money from private demand, not just as a domestic product, but as a truly usable public cloud.

Thank you for your continued support.

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