Jensen Huang turns Tokyo izakaya into AI power summit with Japan's chip industry leaders

On Wednesday night, Jensen Huang was in Tokyo’s central Kanda district courting the little-known Japanese suppliers that underpin the AI supply chain.

The Nvidia Corp. chief executive officer swept into a cozy izakaya in the area popular for after-work drinks, turning a narrow lane known for grilled pork skewers and beer crates into a theater for the AI boom. Outside, a crowd pressed in with smartphones raised, hoping for a glimpse of the man they refer to as kawajan-san — Mr. Leather Jacket — on social media and whose chips have become central to the global AI race.

Inside sat the chiefs of Kioxia Holdings Corp., maker of advanced flash memory chips; Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., the world’s leading provider of advanced silicon wafers; chip gear designer Tokyo Electron Ltd.; and Ajinomoto Co., the sole supplier of a film used in leading-edge chip packages. The heads of fiber-optic cable maker Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. and advanced capacitor producer Taiyo Yuden Co. also attended. Panasonic Holdings Corp.’s Yuki Kusumi was spotted at the pub as well.

The meeting was testament to the breadth of engineering, components and hardware that Nvidia’s next wave of artificial intelligence systems depends on. Beyond its own graphics processors, the company needs advanced memory, networking, substrates, chemicals and manufacturing knowhow supplied by companies across Japan’s vast industrial ecosystem. Nitto Boseki Co., for example, is responsible for almost all the world’s ultra-thin T-Glass cloth, used to keep chips from warping. Its CEO was in Kanda too.

The foundations of semiconductor manufacturing — from high-purity materials to equipment and packaging systems — come from Japan, Huang had said earlier that day. “The manufacturing is done around the world, but the fundamental technology, chemical technology, materials technology, the fundamental sciences? Here in Japan,” said the Taiwan-born billionaire.

Huang, dressed in a brand new leather jacket gifted by his wife, braved the sweltering Tokyo humidity. He handed out bottles of sake to executives, traded jokes over plates of smoky yakiton pork skewers and later emerged to pass red bean cakes to bystanders gathered outside.

The crowd was pleased. The world’s most valuable company, worth in excess of $5.1 trillion, sent its co-founder and talismanic leader to court Japan’s quiet industrial champions in one of the most traditional Tokyo neighborhoods. Huang exchanged pleasantries with a person outside the izakaya, who asked for Nvidia to make its products cheaper, and the two eventually shook hands.

After the dinner, reporters asked Tokyo Electron CEO Toshiki Kawai what Huang was seeking of the Japanese supply chain. “Oh, there’s a ton of expectations,” Kawai said, without elaborating.