Nvidia and Japan announce national AI factory and robotics partnerships during Jensen Huang’s Tokyo visit

During a two-day visit to Tokyo on July 15–16, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met with Japan’s industrial and chip-supply leadership and announced a package of agreements spanning the country’s technology ecosystem.

Japan’s government and approximately 44 domestic firms—including SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda—will jointly develop Noetra, a sovereign AI initiative for robots, vehicles, and factory floors. Tokyo pledged up to 1 trillion yen (about $6.2 billion) over five years to fund the project, which aims to create homegrown “physical AI” foundation models.

Nvidia will build a Vera Rubin AI factory in Japan, planned for a 2028 launch. The facility is expected to house 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts of power. Noetra will oversee construction and operation of the data center.

Japan’s robotics coalition—comprising Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and the robotics group AIRoA—will build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models. Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a variant optimized to run on its Jetson Thor chips inside machines, and partners are already testing shared control systems or building new tools.

Toyota, which already uses Nvidia chips across its stack, committed to extend Nvidia’s Drive platform into manufacturing simulations and advanced driver assistance systems for its next-generation vehicles.

Japan’s broader AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, sets targets of 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040 and seeks to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market valued at roughly ¥20 trillion ($133 billion). The government estimates total public and private physical-AI investment at about $65 billion.