Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, recently spent two days in Tokyo, Japan, meeting with the country’s top industrial and chip-supply leaders. This visit comes after a keynote in Taiwan and a visit to South Korea, highlighting the company’s growing interest in Japan’s tech ecosystem. Huang’s message was clear: Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in.
Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat. Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again to build the physical-AI era. This time, the stakes are higher, with a national AI factory, partnerships with leading robotics companies, and agreements with chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips.
Noetra: Japan’s Sovereign-AI Play
Japan doesn’t want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. To address this concern, the government has brought together roughly 44 domestic firms, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda at the core, to build its own AI for robots, vehicles, and factory floors. This initiative, called Noetra, aims to create a homegrown ‘physical AI’ foundation model built to run machines. The government is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years to support this effort.
Noetra’s plan is divided into three stages. The first stage, starting in fiscal 2026, will focus on developing a reasoning model with strong Japanese-language skills. The second stage, by 2028, will involve building an omni-modal version that can handle text, images, video, and audio. Finally, the third stage, by 2030, will release a ‘Real-world Native AI’ model built to run robots, which will be made available to outside Noetra developers in phases.
Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build a massive data center using Nvidia’s next-generation chips. The data center, dubbed ‘the Vera Rubin AI factory,’ will be packed with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts of computing power. This facility is expected to launch in 2028 and will serve as the hub for training models of a scale into the trillions of parameters.
The Robotics Coalition
Nvidia is also partnering with Japan’s industrial giants to form a robotics coalition. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and robotics group AIRoA have all signed on to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models. Cosmos is an open-model effort started by Nvidia in May with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a version of the model that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves.
Some of the coalition members are already testing a shared control system, while others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the tools now. Huang emphasized that the next frontier of AI lies in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan. He added, ‘Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.’
Toyota: Cars and Physical AI
Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack and has committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform. The newer work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, into the software that runs its vehicles, and into systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will run advanced driver assistance, which steers and brakes but still requires a driver.
Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to back it. Facing a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment. The longer game is bigger, with Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy aiming to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market valued at roughly ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion.
