Two supercomputers featuring NVIDIA Blackwell land in Japan by 2026

Japan’s RIKEN research institute plans to enhance its scientific computing infrastructure with two new supercomputers powered by NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell-generation GPUs, expected to be operational by spring 2026. Together, these systems will house 2,140 NVIDIA GPUs and focus on advancing AI-driven research, high-performance computing, and quantum technology development. The first supercomputer, equipped with 1,600 GPUs on the GB200 NVL4 platform and connected via NVIDIA’s Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking, will support AI-accelerated scientific workflows in life sciences, materials research, climate forecasting, manufacturing, and laboratory automation. This system aims to accelerate large-scale AI model training and simulations critical to these fields. The second machine, featuring 540 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with the same architecture and networking, is dedicated to quantum computing research. It will not function as a quantum computer but will accelerate the development of quantum algorithms, hybrid quantum-classical simulations, and software to improve quantum hardware usability. This