Asia Tech Wire (Aug 15) -- Japan's SoftBank Group has turned its sights on TSMC after talks with Intel over an AI chip partnership ended in failure, according to the Financial Times.

The latest report said that SoftBank had been in talks with Intel to produce an artificial intelligence chip to compete with Nvidia, but the plan ended in failure as the U.S. chipmaker struggled to meet SoftBank's requirements.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said the partnership talks with Intel would have accelerated SoftBank's efforts to combine the chip designs of its British chip firm Arm with the production expertise of Graphcore, the Bristol-based AI chipmaker it acquired in July, to create a product that would compete with Nvidia's market-leading AI chips.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son plans to invest billions of dollars in an attempt to put the Japanese conglomerate at the center of the AI boom.

He has presented big tech companies with ambitious plans for chip production and software, as well as powering the data centers that house its processors.

SoftBank is now focusing on talks with TSMC after talks with Intel broke down in recent months, these people said.