Japan’s SoftBank has singled out emerging 5G applications in vertical sectors such as automotive and industrial, alongside virtualized RAN, as targets for new data centers – enhanced with the latest AI chips from Nvidia based on the Arm Neoverse 64-bit cores optimized for machine learning. The new network of data centers will offer 5G services to other operators on a multi-tenant server platform, aiming to reduce costs and energy consumption, according to SoftBank president and CEO Junichi Miyakawa. This collaboration with Nvidia will enable its infrastructure to achieve a significantly higher performance using AI, “including optimization of the RAN”, he insisted. The seeds were sown for this data center development in September 2022, when Arm unveiled additions to its Arm…