Arm, SoftBank Fund $15.5M AI Research Between US and Japan

Tokyo, Japan—Arm and SoftBank Group Corp will provide $15.5 million to fund artificial intelligence research at Carnegie Mellon University and Keio University in Japan, the organizations said on Thursday.

The funding is part of a $110 million commitment from technology companies to support AI research collaborations between U.S. and Japanese universities, following a research partnership launched by the two countries last year.

According to a university statement, the Carnegie Mellon-Keio partnership will focus on four areas of AI research: multimodal learning, robotics, human-AI interaction, and AI applications in life sciences.

Arm will provide Carnegie Mellon researchers access to its hardware and software technology, while SoftBank will establish a fellowship program for doctoral students and support undergraduate research opportunities.

The U.S.-Japan initiative also includes a separate research partnership between the University of Washington and the University of Tsukuba, with additional funding from Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and other companies.

The statement said exchanges between Carnegie Mellon and Keio began in late 2024, and researchers from both institutions had made reciprocal visits.

Current projects include developing systems for home-task robots and methods to improve the handling of multimodal data by large language models.