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Nvidia\u2019s chief Jensen Huang spent two days \u2014 July 15 and 16 \u2014 in Tokyo, courting Japan\u2019s industrial and chip-supply elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan,<\/a> and<\/a> months after a visit to South Korea<\/a>. He left with deals spanning Japan\u2019s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country\u2019s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia\u2019s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan\u2019s factory floor, and many of the country\u2019s biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI\u2019s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.<\/p>\n Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment<\/a> helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today, Nvidia and Japan\u2019s industrial giants need each other again \u2014 this time to build the physical-AI era, starting with these three projects:<\/p>\n Noetra<\/strong> \u2014 Japan\u2019s sovereign-AI play.<\/strong> The country doesn\u2019t want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So, the government pulled together roughly 44 domestic firms, with SoftBank, Sony,\u00a0 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<\/a>, a bet on homegrown \u201cphysical AI\u201d,\u00a0 foundation models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. The hardware to build it, though, still comes from Nvidia. The U.S chip giant is building \u201ca Vera Rubin AI factory\u201d, a massive data center packed with its next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028, with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs<\/a>, delivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. Noetra\u2019s plan runs in three stages<\/a>: a reasoning model heavy on Japanese-language skills starting in fiscal 2026; an omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio by 2028; and \u201cReal-world Native AI\u201d built to run robots by 2030, released to outside Noetra developers in phases.<\/p>\n The robotics coalition \u00a0\u2014 Japan\u2019s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos.<\/strong> Nvidia is targeting Japan\u2019s factory floor, and many of the country\u2019s top robotics<\/a> and manufacturing players are signing on. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they \u00a0plan to build on Nvidia\u2019s Cosmos models, an open-model effort Nvidia started in May<\/a> with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge<\/a>, a version of the model that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the tools now. \u201cThe next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,\u201d Huang said<\/a> in the company\u2019s statement. \u201cJapan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.\u201d<\/p>\n Toyota \u2014 cars and physical AI. <\/strong>Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia\u2019s Drive platform<\/a> at CES in January 2025<\/a>; the newer work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, into the software that runs its vehicles, and into systems that read road traffic. Toyota\u2019s cars will run advanced driver assistance, which steers and brakes but still requires a driver, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on a human driver.<\/p>\n Huang\u2019s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan\u2019s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to back it. Facing a shrinking workforce,<\/a> Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots<\/a> across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n The longer game is bigger. Japan\u2019s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30%<\/a> of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly \u00a520 trillion, or about $133 billion. \u00a0METI is funding a domestic foundation model to run the machines, and Noetra\u2019s Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, into the trillions of parameters, would be trained. The wager is that Japan\u2019s factory-floor data and manufacturing base can do for physical AI<\/p>\n Underneath the industrial pitch 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 doesn\u2019t control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government\u2019s physical-AI launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi<\/a> joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing \u00a5370 trillion ($2.3 trillion<\/a>) in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra\u2019s factory \u2014 which Nvidia bills as \u201cthe world\u2019s first national AI infrastructure\u201d<\/a> \u2014 is the clearest bet yet. Japan\u2019s push for independence, at least for now, rests on American chips.ndence runs on American silicon.<\/p>\n In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech \u2014 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the same playbook he ran weeks earlier \u2014 a homecoming keynote in Taiwan, fried chicken<\/a>, and a 50,000-GPU deal in Seoul last fall.<\/a> This time, it was Tokyo\u2019s turn, with the robots, the supply chain, and the chips underneath.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n