English 
Soft Bank Group is ramping up its AI cloud efforts by opening a large battery business in Japan, exemplifying how the artificial intelligence boom is rebounding into a new energy, manufacturing and industrial strategy across Asia. This venture will build and sell the latest battery cells and energy storage systems, to meet the huge electricity needs of AI data centers and computing infrastructure. The project will be managed via SoftBank Corp.
The group telecoms company, with Cosmos Lab and DeltaX of South Korea. The production facilities for the cells would be set-up in Sakai City Osaka where SoftBank is setting-up a large AI data center and AI hardware manufacturing base. Commercial production of batteries would be launched by fiscal 2028 and mass production will be in the next year.
AI Infrastructure Creates Massive Energy Demand
This announcement signals a quickly developing reality across the global AI industry: energy infrastructure is fast acquiring strategic parity with computing power and semiconductors. Huge electricity is needed for AI data centers to produce and run large language models, cloud AI applications, robotics and supercomputing.
こちらもお読みください： 韓米日、AIチップとエネルギーの共同提携を推進
With the rapid growth of AI application worldwide, more and more governments and technology companies are joining in the investment of battery storage, renewable power and power systems.
SoftBank’s new venture tackles this problem by creating a battery system for the infrastructure of the AI-time. SoftBank will manufacture Battery Cell and Battery Energy Storage systems to power AI data centers, industrial and grid level power control facilities.
Partnering with Cosmos Lab for future zinc-halogen battery technology and partner with DeltaX for high density battery systems for AI infrastructure.
Japan Expands Beyond Semiconductors Into AI Power Infrastructure
Despite the attention paid to Japan’s semiconductor and AI-software investments, for all its striking competition with Intel, we see a larger transition taking place in Japan’s tech sector. They now realize that in the future, power infrastructure will emerge as a key competitive element of the AI economy.
This puts Japan on the map not only as a developer of AI technologies, but also a builder of the industrial ecosystem that will support the application of these technologies on a large scale.
It looks like in the Osaka Sakai site, we will be bring together an integrated AI electrical power infrastructure with data centers, batteries and AI hardware manufacturing.
This is one of the global developments emerging where the machine learning toolbox as well a s the equipment powering it is now being vertically integrated into strategies for power systems (e.g Meta Microsoft A nnkahrs, OpenAI-related infrastructure ventures etc.) through investments into energy systems and battery/storage and power generation.
日本のハイテク産業への戦略的示唆
For Japan’s technology sector, SoftBank’s battery initiative could have wide-ranging industrial implications.
Production of batteries could be a major growth area as AI infrastructure scales up. Firms making advanced materials, industrial automation, semiconductor equipment, and energy management systems could see increased demand for AI supporting infrastructure.
Another potential motivation for the project is to bolster Japan’s standing within supply chains for AI goods and services worldwide. Spreading the appliance of energy infrastructure with AI enablers and data centers may be a move by Japan to establish a fully integrated AI supply chain of its own and compete with the U.S. and China.
Soft Bank has a strong track record of investing in AI related companies like its significant investments in Open AI, Arm Holdings, robotics startups, and huge infrastructure projects like the Stargate AI project. The battery business Because of this takes its place in Softbank’s larger plan to provide the basic tools of the AI economy.
Opportunities for Businesses and Industry Players
The growth of AI-centered energy infrastructure can bring many benefits to many fields. All battery makers, industrial-robot companies, chipmakers, and producers of renewable-energy technologies could see increased demand from the long-awaited build-out of AI infrastructure.
Data-center providers want more efficient storing energy equipment that keep electric consumption in check and cut the running bills.
This project might also hasten the use of smart-grid technologies and of industrial energy-management systems in Japan. As the AI infrastructure expands, energy available for distributed consumption and storage will probably become the mostfactor in achieving competitiveness.
Soft Bank expects the battery business to account for annual sales of more than 100 billion by the 2030th fiscal year (2008).
Rising Competition in the Global AI Infrastructure Race
SoftBank’s announcement comes amid intensifying global competition surrounding AI infrastructure.
Most tech companies and governments are heavily investing in semiconductors, hardware for artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and energy systems to bolster future growth of AI. More and more experts in the industry believe the bottleneck of a giant scale of AI would be the access of energy and storage of batteries.
In recent trading sessions, the market movement demonstrate increasing enthusiasm among investor for AI infrastructure-related sectors such as semiconductors, memory chips and high-end manufacturing systems.
Japan’s emphasis on combining batteries, AI hardware, and data center architecture will, as a result, potentially bolster the country in the intensive global AI competition while also lessening reliance on importers of infrastructural enablers.
前途
The introduction of a battery manufacturing project by Soft Bank is a relevant move which sees the origin of a different approach to on AI infrastructure. The world of AI future is no longer governed by the software fundamentals of models and the silicon performance of chips.
Power generation, storage and energy resilience are becoming as important as the technology as part of the economy of AI.
The country has revealed that it is part of a broader attempt to develop integrated AI systems through its Industry Strategy involving energy systems, advanced manufacture, semiconductors and cloud infrastructure.
With AI adoption likely to keep on growing across organizations and sectors, the companies that will end up at the top in the next round of the worldwide technology contest are the ones that can acquire both the necessary computing capacity and the energy backbone.
日本語