The industry ministry said Friday that it has selected 18 regions as green transformation strategy areas. The ministry will support the regions by easing regulations on land use and providing subsidies, aiming to attract companies and investment from Japan and abroad as part of efforts to strengthen the industrial competitiveness of regional economies. Demand for data centers is growing with the spread of generative artificial intelligence, while operating them requires enormous amounts of electricity. The ministry aims to attract large-scale data centers requiring around 1 gigawatt of power to regions rich in decarbonized energy sources to revitalize domestic investment and local industries. The ministry designated nine of the 18 regions as areas for concentrating data centers.

I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him, Shoichiro Irimajiri said in an interview. Shoichiro Irimajiri, former president of what is now Sega Co., said in a recent interview that he had decided to invest $5 million in then-fledgling U.S. chipmaker Nvidia in the late 1990s because he was impressed by the character of its CEO, Jensen Huang. Irimajiri, 86, was head of then-Sega Enterprises when he persuaded the company's top executives to rescue the struggling Nvidia, which has since become one of the world's biggest companies. "I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him," Irimajiri said in the interview. Sega contracted Nvidia to develop a graphics processing unit for the Dreamcast game console it was developing to compete with the PlayStation console released by then Sony Computer Entertainment.

In some municipalities in Hokkaido to be designated as national strategic special zones, autonomous tractors will be allowed to travel on public roads without a driver onboard. The government decided Thursday to designate 19 municipalities in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, including the city of Obihiro, as national strategic special zones to promote artificial intelligence-powered agriculture. The government will apply special deregulation measures to the areas, including simplifying the procedures needed to operate robot tractors autonomously on public roads and spraying pesticides with drones. Under current laws, robot tractors capable of autonomous operation must have a driver when traveling on public roads, such as from a warehouse to a field. When multiple tractors are used on vast farmland, each tractor must be crewed, thus preventing farmers from fully realizing the benefits of the labor-saving technology.

NAIROBI - In a school for the deaf in Kenya, children signed their excitement as a team demonstrated how a robotic arm could revolutionize their studies. Roughly 300,000 children in the east African nation are deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Kenya Society for Deaf Children, but just 20,000 were enrolled in schools as of 2024. Kenyan startup ZeroBionic, co-founded by 22-year-old Norah Kimathi, hopes to tackle some of the educational difficulties they face. It has built a mechanical hand that can translate a teacher's voice into sign language in real time, allowing deaf children to learn alongside their hearing counterparts. For the students at the Kasarani Treeside Secondary School for the Deaf in Nairobi, there is another element of the technology that is even more promising.

An empty lot is stacked with aluminum brackets, steel rods and wooden planks in Ulanqab, China. Set in rolling grassland, Ulanqab is an unlikely technological hub. Yet this modest city of less than 2 million people in Inner Mongolia has found itself on the front line of China's efforts to relocate computing power away from its crowded eastern megacities and out to its western regions, where both space and inexpensive green energy are abundant. At one cluttered intersection on the eastern edge of the city on a Friday at lunchtime, workers streamed out of a cluster of data-center construction sites -- a reminder of the scale of the endeavor here, some 350 kilometers northwest of Beijing. Still wearing hard hats and high-visibility vests, their pants and boots caked in dust, they congregated at a cluster of trucks selling cheap meals, beer and cigarettes.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October, at the earliest. The firm had been expected to make its IPO prospectus public as early as next week. Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the U.S. midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The artificial intelligence company had been expected to make its IPO prospectus public as early as next week, two of the people said, a crucial step that would kick off the final stages of the offering. Now that is not expected until late September, the people added, cautioning that the plans, including the timing, are subject to change.

The robots -- one modeled after a rockhopper penguin and the other after a gentoo penguin -- are exhibited among real penguins at the theme park, the world's only facility to house 10 species of penguins. Visitors looked amazed to see one of the robots deftly move its flippers to change direction and dive deeper into the water as it swam next to real Humboldt penguins. "I thought it was real," one visitor said. The robots were created by Ikuma Okada, the 34-year-old leader of a group within the Adventure World operator. The robot penguins were created by Ikuma Okada, the 34-year-old leader of a group within the Adventure World operator.

The number of initial public offerings in Japan has been falling sharply amid a slowdown in technology listings. The number of initial public offerings in Japan has been falling sharply, reflecting a slowing pace of new listings by software-related companies that had previously led IPO activity in the country. Companies are moving to postpone their IPOs amid financial market turmoil caused by the war in Iran, concerns that artificial intelligence could replace traditional software products and businesses, and rising interest rates. The Tokyo Stock Exchange's mainstay Prime, Growth and Standard sections saw 17 companies go public in the first half of the year, down about 30% from a year before, according to the TSE. Annual IPO activity has been lackluster since the number peaked at 123 in 2021, when fundraising conditions were favorable as countries eased monetary policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Japan's top court to test use of AI in civil trials The Supreme Court has included some ¥60 million for expenses related to the use of AI in its budget request for fiscal 2027. The Supreme Court plans to examine in the next fiscal year whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in civil trials. On Monday, the top court announced its budget request for fiscal 2027, which included some ¥60 million for expenses related to the use of AI. This is the court's first budget request including such expenses. According to the Supreme Court, records of settled lawsuits will be used in a demonstration test on AI use.

The Consumer Affairs Agency has established a group to use generative artificial intelligence technology to more quickly detect investment scams and other fraudulent schemes. The Consumer Affairs Agency said Tuesday it will step up its fight against investment and other fraud promising lucrative returns by using generative artificial intelligence technology to enhance information analysis. A group established within the agency the same day will utilize the technology to find schemes with similar patterns to past fraud cases and malicious business operators to enable quicker intervention, the agency said, announcing a set of measures against the type of scheme that attracts large amounts of money by promising high returns before eventually collapsing. "Recovery is difficult once the damage (from fraud) is done, so it is important to respond quickly," consumer affairs minister Hitoshi Kikawada told a news conference. The new group will run a generative AI system to analyze cases reported to the National Consumer Affairs Center's information system for consultation, which number about 900,000 annually.