TOKYO, July 19 (Reuters) - Japan needs to rapidly expand computing power as it vies to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, said Hideki Murai, a special AI adviser to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. "The government's key priority is computing power. We feel a real sense of crisis about that," Murai, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who heads the government's AI strategy team, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. Japan, the world's third-largest economy, has been slow to invest in the field, and lags the United States in AI computer infrastructure. Some 3,000 companies in Japan have access to a supercomputer at the government's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) offering 0.8 exaflops of computing power.

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Persons: Hideki Murai, Fumio Kishida, OpenAI, Murai, Shohei Ohtani, Tim Kelly, Sam Nussey, Miho Uranaka, Sam Holmes Organizations: Liberal Democratic, Reuters, government's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science, Technology, Microsoft, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade, Industry, SoftBank Corp, AIs, Japan, Major League, European Union, Thomson Locations: TOKYO, Japan, United States, AIST, European