NVIDIA today announced that it is working with the U.S. Department of Energy's national labs and the nation's leading companies to build America's AI infrastructure to support scientific discovery, economic growth and power the next industrial revolution.

"We are at the dawn of the AI industrial revolution that will define the future of every industry and nation," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "It is imperative that America lead the race to the future—this is our generation's Apollo moment. The next wave of inventions, discoveries and progress will be determined by our nation's ability to scale AI infrastructure. Together with our partners, we are building the most advanced AI infrastructure ever created, ensuring that America has the foundation for a prosperous future, and that the world's AI runs on American innovation, openness and collaboration, for the benefit of all."

The zettascale era is officially on the map, as Japan has announced plans to develop a successor to its renowned Fugaku supercomputer. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has set its sights on creating a machine capable of unprecedented processing power, aiming for 50 ExaFLOPS of peak AI performance with zettascale capabilities. The ambitious "Fugaku Next" project, slated to begin development next year, will be headed by RIKEN, one of Japan's leading research institutions, in collaboration with tech giant Fujitsu. With a target completion date of 2030, the new supercomputer aims to surpass current technological boundaries, potentially becoming the world's fastest once again. MEXT's vision for the "Fugaku Next" includes groundbreaking specifications for each computational node.

The ministry anticipates peak performance of several hundred FP64 TFLOPS for double-precision computations, around 50 FP16 PFLOPS for AI-oriented half-precision calculations, and approximately 100 PFLOPS for AI-oriented 8-bit precision calculations. These figures represent a major leap from Fugaku's current capabilities. The project's initial funding is set at ¥4.2 billion ($29.06 million) for the first year, with total government investment expected to exceed ¥110 billion ($761 million). While the specific architecture remains undecided, MEXT suggests the use of CPUs with special-purpose accelerators or a CPU-GPU combination. The semiconductor node of choice will likely be a 1 nm node or even more advanced nodes available at the time, with advanced packaging also used. The supercomputer will also feature an advanced storage system to handle traditional HPC and AI workloads efficiently. We already have an insight into Monaka, Fujitsu's upcoming CPU design with 150 Armv9 cores. However, Fugaku Next will be powered by the Monaka Next design, which will likely be much more capable.