Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is in Tokyo for two days – July 15 and 16 – meeting with Japan’s industry and chip supply elite, weeks after the keynote speech. Taiwan, and months after the visit South Korea. He left with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national artificial intelligence factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies and deals with suppliers of chip materials that power Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in. The next chapter of artificial intelligence is for factory floors, robots and machines, Huang said, and he wants Japan to build it.
Thirty years ago A $5 million Sega investment helped propel bankrupt Nvidia afloat; Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again – this time to build the era of physical artificial intelligence, starting with these three projects:
Noetra — Japan’s sovereign-AI game. The country does not want American or Chinese artificial intelligence to run its factories and robots. So the government brought together some 44 domestic firms, including SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda, to create its own artificial intelligence for robots, vehicles and factory floors. Tokyo commits 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years.a bet on homegrown “physical AI,” foundational models built to drive machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. The hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia. The US chip giant is building a ‘Vera Rubin AI factory’, a massive data center full of next-generation chips expected to be operational in 2028. With 13,750 Vera CPU and 27,500 Rubin GPUIt provides 140 megawatts of energy. Noetra will oversee the effort with plans to build a data center. of Noetra the plan consists of three phases: Reasoning model based on Japanese language skills starting in fiscal year 2026; An omni-modal version that works with text, images, video and audio by 2028; and by 2030, “Real-world Native AI” built to control the robots was released in phases to third-party Noetra developers.
Robotics coalition – Japan’s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting the Japanese factory floor and lots of it the country’s best robotics and producer players sign. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA have said they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models. May with several global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to get over it Cosmos 3 Edgeversion of the model running on Jetson Thor chips inside the machines. Some are already testing a shared governance system; Others, such as Honda R&D and Omron, are now working on tools. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” Huang said. he said in a company statement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intellectual industries.”
Toyota — cars and physical artificial intelligence. Toyota uses Nvidia chips in most of its stack. He entrusted the next generation of cars to Nvidia Driver platform hour CES in January 2025; the new business expands Nvidia into manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, software that controls vehicles and systems that read traffic. Toyota’s cars will operate with advanced driver assistance that steers and brakes but still requires a driver, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on the human driver.
Huang’s visit puts physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending money to support it. Facing a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million robots equipped with artificial intelligence by 2040 in 18 sectors, Backed by $65 billion in public and private physical AI investment.
The long game is bigger. Japan’s AI robotics strategy, released in March, aims to catch up More than 30% By 2040, the global artificial intelligence robotics market, the Tokyo market, is estimated to be worth an estimated ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a local foundational model to drive the machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is where models at this scale will be made, up to trillions of parameters. The bet is that Japan’s factory data and manufacturing base could do for physical AI.
The industry is sovereign under its work. As the U.S. and China advance large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own computing, and less dependence on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared alongside Trade Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical AI launch on July 16. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi connected with video. The Takaichi administration has made artificial intelligence and semiconductors central to its development plan ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) in public and private investments until 2040. Noetra’s factory — Nvidia reckons it is “The world’s first national AI infrastructure” – is the clearest bet yet. Japan’s push for independence, at least now, is based on American chips.ndence American silicon works.
Over the course of two days, Huang dined with nearly every name who mattered in Japanese technology—the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki—and dozens of supply chain executives over skewers and whiskey at a Kanda izakaya.
It’s the same playbook he used weeks ago – his homecoming keynote 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 underneath.
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