Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent July 15 and 16 in Tokyo, meeting with Japan's industrial and chip-supply leaders. The visit came weeks after a keynote in Taiwan and months after a trip to South Korea. Huang left with agreements spanning Japan's entire tech ecosystem, including a national AI factory, partnerships with leading robotics companies, and deals with chip-material suppliers that power Nvidia's next generation of AI chips. His message was clear: Nvidia is targeting Japan's factory floor, and many of the country's biggest manufacturers are joining in. Huang said AI's next chapter belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.
Thirty years ago, a $5 million investment from Sega helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat. Today, Nvidia and Japan's industrial giants need each other again, this time to build the physical AI era. The visit produced three major projects.
Noetra: Japan's Sovereign AI Play
Japan does not want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So the government 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. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen, or $6.2 billion, over five years. This bet on homegrown physical AI involves foundation models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain.
The hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia. The U.S. chip giant is building a Vera Rubin AI factory, a massive data center packed with its next-generation chips. The facility is expected to launch in 2028 with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort and plans to build the data center.
Noetra's plan runs in three stages. A reasoning model heavy on Japanese language skills will start in fiscal 2026. An omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio will follow by 2028. A Real-world Native AI built to run robots will arrive by 2030, released to outside Noetra developers in phases.
The Robotics Coalition: Japan's Industrial Giants Line Up Behind Cosmos
Nvidia is targeting Japan's factory floor, and many of the country's top robotics and manufacturing players are signing on. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and robotics group AIRoA say they plan to build on Nvidia's Cosmos models. Nvidia started the Cosmos open-model effort in May with a handful of global AI labs.
In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit by unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge. This version of the model runs on Nvidia's Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some companies are already testing a shared control system. Others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the 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 in the company's statement. "Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries."
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Toyota: Cars and Physical AI
Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. At CES in January 2025, Toyota committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia's Drive platform. The newer work extends Nvidia into Toyota's 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. This is a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on a human driver.
Why It Matters
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. Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040. Tokyo values that market at roughly 20 trillion yen, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a domestic foundation model to run the machines, and Noetra's Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, into the trillions of parameters, would be trained. The wager is that Japan's factory floor data and manufacturing base can do for physical AI what the internet did for language AI.
Underneath the industrial case is a sovereign one. As the U.S. and China pull ahead in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own 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 the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing 370 trillion yen, or $2.3 trillion, in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra's factory, which Nvidia bills as the world's first national AI infrastructure, is the clearest bet yet. Japan's push for independence, at least for now, rests on American chips.
Working the Whole Room
In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech. He met with the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki over lunch. He also met with dozens of supply chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya.
It is the same playbook he ran weeks earlier, a homecoming keynote in Taiwan, fried chicken, and 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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