European Union Seeking to Strengthen Semiconductor Ecosystem

Japan's NTT, the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world, recently announced the formation of a cooperative organization of Japanese firms designed to promote Japan's technical position in quantum technologies and to help Japan complete globally with US and Chinese rivals in both quantum computing and quantum communications. The inaugural meeting of the group, held in late May 2021, was attended by 11 Japanese companies, including leading IT suppliers Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Toshiba as well as industrial partners including Toyota Motor, Mitsubishi Chemical, and the Mizuho Financial Group. More than 50 companies are ultimately expected to join the group.

Recently, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) trained the first large artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to understand, speak, and write in the Spanish language. The system, named MarIA, was trained on the MareNostrum supercomputer at the BSC, leveraging 59 TBs of language data from the Biblioteca Nacional de España, one of the world's largest public libraries. The model is said to be an expert in both writing and understanding the Spanish language and is free to use by any developer, company, or entity. The system has a wide variety of potential applications including summarization applications, chatbots, smart searches, translation engines, and automatic subtitling chatbots.