(Yicai) Jan. 24 -- Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of US chip giant Nvidia, has completed a week-long visit to China and has flown on to neighboring Japan.

Nvidia told Yicai that Huang departed from Shanghai on a private jet on Jan. 22. The plane was bound for Osaka, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. Before heading to Osaka, Huang had visited Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Taipei.

Osaka is a major center for cloud service providers in Japan. Firms such as Sakura Internet are headquartered there and are heavily investing in Nvidia's graphics processing units to expand their artificial intelligence and cloud capabilities.

Japan was exempted from new chip export controls brought in by the US government. At Nvidia's summit in Japan last November, Huang and SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son unveiled a collaboration to build AI infrastructure in Japan, including the country's biggest AI factory.

In addition to Tokyo-based SoftBank, other Japanese cloud service providers are also racing to use Nvidia's chips to build AI infrastructure. Sakura Internet founder Kunihiro Tanaka said his company is considering buying around 10,000 Nvidia GPUs a year.

The United States also unveiled a major AI infrastructure investment on Jan. 22, with Son attending the launch event. SoftBank is expected to contribute USD19 billion to The Stargate Project, which President Donald Trump described as the “largest AI infrastructure project by far in history.”

That same day, Nvidia's shares [NASDAQ: NVDA] jumped 4.4 percent in New York trading, pushing the company's market cap beyond USD3.6 trillion to surpass Apple and reclaim the title of world's most valuable business. The stock rose 0.1 percent yesterday to close at USD147.22.

Editor: Futura Costaglione