The Japanese government announced this week that it will be hopping on one of today’s hottest technology bandwagons by building what it claims will be the world’s fastest supercomputer for deep learning research.

The goal behind the new system, which sports the descriptive-yet-boring name of AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, is to provide Japanese startups, businesses and academics with a tool to conduct research in emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles, AI-powered healthcare and robotics.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has said that it will be investing over 19.5 billion Japanese yen (roughly $172.4 million) in the new supercomputer, which will boast a computation speed of 130 petaflops, meaning that it can perform somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 quadrillion calculations per second.

“As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast,” Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at Japan’s ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, told Reuters today.

Development on ACBI will not begin until 2017 at the earliest, and the bidding war for the company who will be designing and building the new supercomputer is still open until Dec. 8. Once it is complete, companies and academics will be able to rent time on ACBI to run their own computation tasks. Currently, many of these researchers turn to computing systems owned by Western companies, such as when the University of Tokyo used IBM Watson to refine a medical patient’s leukemia diagnosis.

The Japanese government likely hopes that ACBI will help put Japan back on the map for cutting edge technology, as the country has been facing increasing competition from both China and South Korea in recent years. According to supercomputer benchmarking service Top500.org, China holds both the number one and the number two spots for the current fastest supercomputers, with the top system, the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, coming in at just over 93 petaflops.

There is still no word yet on if the new supercomputer will be getting its own Anime mascot like the one for Windows 7.

photo credit: wongwt 六本木之丘天空甲板 via photopin (license)