Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio pledged closer cooperation with the United States on artificial intelligence research.
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio visited the White House on Wednesday for a summit meeting with President Joe Biden.
The growing Chinese security threat to Pacific nations was a major topic of conversation, but the two leaders discussed various economic and technology issues as well, including the rapidly growing and unnerving field of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Associated Press (AP) archly noted that Kishida and Biden are in comparably dire political straits, as both are struggling with low approval ratings, corruption scandals, and severe economic problems. Both of them were therefore eager to play up the close relationship between Japan and the United States to generate some positive headlines.
“I am hopeful that 2024 will be the year for the Japanese economy to break free from the deflationary sentiment and cost-cutting, scaling-down mentality that has weighed heavily on our nation,” Kishida said during a visit to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday before heading to the White House.
To that end, Kishida met with Microsoft President Brad Smith to celebrate Microsoft’s $3 billion investment in two Japanese data centers and a new AI laboratory. The lab is scheduled to train three million AI workers by 2027. Among their duties will be helping the Japanese government to improve its cybersecurity defenses.
“These investments aim to support Japan’s key pillar to tackle deflation and stimulate the economy by expanding the infrastructure, skilled talent, and security required to accelerate Japan’s digital transformation and adoption of AI,” Microsoft said in its statement on Kishida’s meeting with Smith.
“This significant enhancement in digital capacity will enable Microsoft to provide more advanced computing resources in Japan, including the latest graphics processing units (GPUs), which are crucial for speeding up AI workloads,” the company added.
Microsoft said its Japanese investment was part of the company’s drive to “increase its hyperscale cloud computing and AI infrastructure.”
As the name implies, a hyperscale cloud system is a massive online data storage and processing resource that incorporates numerous widely distributed data centers to create what customers perceive as one big, fuzzy, friendly cloud of services.
