Japanese telecoms giants SoftBank is considering increasing its stake in Nvidia, Bloomberg reports.

The company is currently the fourth largest shareholder, with a 4.9 percent stake - just below that required for a regulatory disclosure in the US.

SoftBank

Chips in

“While we don’t comment on rumors about our investments, we consider ourselves long-term partners to companies, whether private or public,” SoftBank said in a statement.

Bloomberg claims that the company is considering slowly increasing its investment - currently worth about $4.1 billion - and working more closely with the chip maker.

Nvidia’s stock more than tripled in 2016 and is up roughly 32 percent this year, partially due to the company’s rapidly growing data center business.

This year, data center revenue more than doubled in the first quarter to $409 million, easily beating analysts’ estimates of $318.2 million.

“All of the world’s major Internet and cloud service providers now use Nvidia’s Tesla-based GPU accelerators,” Nvidia Colette Kress said on a post-earnings call on Tuesday.

In May, the company launched its Volta GPU and Volta-based processor, the Nvidia Tesla V100 data center GPU. Volta provides a 5x improvement over current-gen Pascal in peak teraflops, and 15x over the older Maxwell architecture.

Making bank

Just as Nvidia has performed well in recent years, so has SoftBank, which saw its market capitalization increased by 557 percent between 2009 and 2014 - the fourth largest relative increase in the world over that period.

But founder, chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son aims to increase the scale of his technology investments due to a belief in the coming Singularity - when AI surpasses man in number and intellect.

“I totally believe this concept. In next 30 years this will become a reality… that’s why I’m in a hurry – to aggregate the cash, to invest,” he said at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.

With this in mind, Son built the SoftBank Vision Fund, the largest tech fund in history, which raised $93 billion in its first close earlier this month. Investors include Apple, Qualcomm, UAE-based Mubadala Investment Company, Saudi Arabia’s PID public fund, Foxconn, and Sharp (which is owned by Foxconn). 

The fund will focus on areas including the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, robotics, infrastructure, telecoms, biotech, fintech and smartphone apps.