Nvidia boss Jensen Huang spent two days (July 15-16) in Tokyo courting Japan’s industrial and chip supplier elite, weeks after a speech at Taiwan, and months after a visit to South Korea. It left with deals that span Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and deals with chip materials suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factories, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are getting on board. The next chapter of AI, Huang said, belongs to factories, robots and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.
Thirty years ago, a Investment of 5 million dollars in Sega helped keep a nearly bankrupt Nvidia afloat; Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again, this time to build the era of physical AI, starting with these three projects:
noetra — Japan’s sovereign-AI game. The country does not want to run its factories and robots with American or Chinese AI. So the government brought together about 44 domestic companies, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda at the center, to build their own artificial intelligence for robots, vehicles and factories. Tokyo commits to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) in five yearsa bet on local “physical AI”, basic models created to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. However, the hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia. The American chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory,” a massive data center packed with next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028. with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUsdelivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort and plans to build the data center. Noetra The plan is executed in three stages.: A reasoning model based on strong Japanese language skills starting in fiscal year 2026; an omnimodal version that handles text, images, video and audio by 2028; and “real-world native AI” built to run robots by 2030, released to third-party Noetra developers in phases.
The robotics coalition: Japan’s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting Japanese factories, and many of the The most important robotics in the country. and manufacturing players are joining in. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models, an open-model effort that Nvidia started in Can with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, revealing Cosmos 3 edgea version of the model that works with its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are taking advantage of these tools now. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” Huang said. saying in the company statement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the era of smart industries.”
Toyota: automobiles and physical artificial intelligence. Toyota uses Nvidia chips in much of its stack. Committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia driving platform in CES in January 2025; The latest work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, to the software that runs its vehicles and to the systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will feature advanced driver assistance, which steers and brakes but still requires a driver, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on a human driver.
Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is investing to support it. Faced with a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million robots equipped with AI in 18 sectors by 2040, Backed by $65 billion in public and private investment in physical AI.
The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI robotics strategy, launched in March, aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at about 20 trillion yen, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a national baseline model to run the machines, and the Nvidia-powered Noetra factory is where models of that scale, in trillions of parameters, would be trained. The bet is that data from Japan’s factories and manufacturing base can be used for physical AI.
Behind the industrial argument there is a sovereign argument. As the United States and China advance large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own computing and less reliance on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared alongside Commerce Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical AI launch on July 16, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made artificial intelligence and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan that pursues 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion)) in public and private investment by 2040. The Noetra factory, which Nvidia considers as “The world’s first national AI infrastructure” – is the clearest bet so far. Japan’s push toward independence, at least for now, relies on American chips. Defense depends on American silicon.
In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every big name in Japanese tech: the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply chain bosses over skewers and whiskey at a Kanda izakaya.
It’s the same manual he used weeks before: a welcome speech in Taiwan, fried chickenand a 50,000 GPU deal in Seoul last fall. This time it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain and the chips below.
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