Chips & Hardware
What to watch for after Jensen Huang's Japan visit
Nvidia's Jensen Huang spent two days in Tokyo securing deals on a national AI factory, a robotics coalition, and Toyota, as Japan bets on physical AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent two days, July 15 and 16, in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip-supply elite — weeks after a keynote in Taiwan and months after a visit to South Korea. He left with deals spanning Japan’s tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with chip-material suppliers. Huang’s message was that AI’s next chapter belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and that he wants Japan to build it.
The centerpiece is Noetra, Japan’s sovereign-AI project: roughly 44 domestic firms, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda at the core, building AI for robots, vehicles, and factory floors so Japan doesn’t have to run them on American or Chinese AI. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years. Nvidia will build the hardware — a “Vera Rubin AI factory” expected to launch in 2028 with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts — which Noetra will oversee. Noetra’s roadmap runs in three stages: a reasoning model strong in Japanese starting in fiscal 2026, an omni-modal version by 2028, and a “Real-world Native AI” built to run robots by 2030.
Japan’s top robotics and manufacturing players — including Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and AIRoA — are signing on to build on Nvidia’s open Cosmos models, with Nvidia unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge, a version that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside machines. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” Huang said. Toyota, meanwhile, is extending its use of Nvidia chips beyond its Drive platform into manufacturing simulations and traffic-reading systems for its vehicles.
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, and aims to capture more than 30% of a global AI robotics market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion ($133 billion).
Why it matters
Japan’s push rests on Nvidia’s American chips even as Tokyo bets on the technology to offset a shrinking workforce and reduce its dependence on U.S. or Chinese AI infrastructure — a sovereignty goal at odds with the hardware it requires to get there.