Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent July 15–16 in Tokyo meeting Japan’s industrial and semiconductor leaders. Coming after recent appearances in Taiwan and a visit to South Korea months earlier, Huang’s Tokyo trip produced agreements across Japan’s technology ecosystem, from a government-backed national AI project to partnerships with major robotics firms and deals with suppliers of materials for next-generation chips.
Huang’s message was explicit: Nvidia is aiming at the factory floor, and many of Japan’s largest manufacturers are joining. The company argues that the next chapter of AI will play out in the physical world — factories, robots and machines — and it wants Japan to help build it.
Noetra: Japan’s sovereign-AI initiative
Japan is intent on running its factories and robots on domestic AI rather than relying solely on American or Chinese systems. To that end, about 44 domestic firms were assembled into a consortium centered on SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda to develop homegrown “physical AI” — foundation models tailored to control machines.
Tokyo has pledged up to 1 trillion yen (about $6.2 billion) over five years to the effort. Nvidia will supply major parts of the hardware: the company is building what it calls a “Vera Rubin AI factory,” a large data center planned to open in 2028 and populated with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, consuming 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the project and construct the data center. Its rollout is planned in three stages: a reasoning model with strong Japanese-language capability starting in fiscal 2026; an omni-modal model handling text, images, video and audio by 2028; and a “Real-world Native AI” for running robots by 2030, which will be phased out to outside Noetra developers.
Robotics coalition: Cosmos and industrial partners
Several leading Japanese robotics and manufacturing firms — including Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and the robotics group AIRoA — said they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models. Cosmos is an open-model initiative Nvidia launched in May; in Tokyo the company revealed Cosmos 3 Edge, a variant designed to run on Jetson Thor chips embedded in the machines themselves.
Some partners are already testing shared control systems; others, such as Honda R&D and Omron, are developing on the new tools. In a company statement Huang said the physical world is the next frontier of AI and that this represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan.
Toyota: cars, manufacturing and driver assistance
Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its technology stack. The company committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform at CES in January 2025; the expanded collaboration extends Nvidia into Toyota’s manufacturing simulations, vehicle software, and traffic-sensing systems. Toyota’s vehicles will run advanced driver-assistance features that steer and brake but still require a human driver, a more conservative approach than companies pursuing less driver-dependent systems.
Why this matters
Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is backing the effort financially. Facing a shrinking workforce, Japan aims to deploy 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, supported by about $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment.
Japan’s longer-term ambition is larger: the Japan AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly 20 trillion yen (about $133 billion). The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is funding a domestic foundation model to operate machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is intended as the site to train models at the trillions-of-parameters scale.
Beneath the industrial rationale is a sovereignty argument: as the U.S. and China advance in large-scale AI, Tokyo seeks its own data, compute and less dependence on infrastructure it does not control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside Trade Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical-AI launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors central to a growth plan that aims to attract 370 trillion yen (about $2.3 trillion) in public and private investment by 2040.
Noetra’s factory — described by Nvidia as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure” — is the clearest current signal of that strategy, though the implementation will rely heavily on American silicon.
Meetings and momentum
Over two days Huang met many of the names that matter in Japanese tech: he spoke with the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki at lunch and met dozens of supply-chain leaders at a Kanda izakaya. The visit followed a familiar playbook — high-profile keynotes, local hospitality and large GPU deals — but this time the emphasis was on Tokyo, robotics and the underlying chip supply chain.
A historical note: roughly 30 years ago a $5 million investment from Sega helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants are again aligning, this time to build the physical-AI era.
