Nvidia's chief Jensen Huang spent 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 entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with leading robotics companies, and agreements with chip-material suppliers. His message was clear: Nvidia is targeting Japan's factory floor, and the country's biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI's next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.
Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment 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, starting with three projects. First, Noetra - Japan's sovereign-AI play. The government pulled 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 ($6.2 billion) over five years on homegrown "physical AI" foundation models. The hardware still comes from Nvidia, which is building a Vera Rubin AI factory - a massive data center with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts, expected to launch in 2028. Noetra's plan runs in three stages: a reasoning model heavy on Japanese-language skills by fiscal 2026; an omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio by 2028; and "Real-world Native AI" for robots by 2030.
Second, the robotics coalition - Japan's industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and robotics group AIRoA plan to build on Nvidia's Cosmos models. In Tokyo, Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a version that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the tools now. "Japan invented modern manufacturing," Huang said. "Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries."
Third, Toyota - cars and physical AI. Toyota committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia's Drive platform at CES in January 2025, and newer work extends Nvidia into manufacturing, software, and systems that read road traffic. Toyota's cars will run advanced driver assistance, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla.
Huang's visit put physical AI at the center of Japan's industrial strategy. 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: Japan's AI Robotics Strategy aims to capture over 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion ($133 billion). METI is funding a domestic foundation model, and Noetra's Nvidia-powered factory would train models into the trillions of parameters.
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, compute, and less dependence on infrastructure it doesn't control. Huang appeared 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 ($2.3 trillion) in investment by 2040. Noetra's factory - billed 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.
In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech - the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply-chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya. Same playbook as Taiwan and Seoul, but this time with robots, supply chains, and the chips underneath.