What to watch for after Jensen Huang’s Japan visit

Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days on 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 the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering 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. AI’s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.

The Three Pillars of Japan’s Physical AI Strategy

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 core projects. The first is Noetra, Japan’s sovereign-AI play. The country doesn’t want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So, 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, approximately $6.2 billion, over five years, as a bet on homegrown physical AI and foundation models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain, while the hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia.

Building the Vera Rubin AI Factory and Data Center

The U.S. chip giant is building a Vera Rubin AI factory, which is a massive data center packed with its next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028. It will feature 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. Noetra’s plan runs in three stages: 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 Real-world Native AI built to run robots by 2030, released to outside Noetra developers in phases. This massive infrastructure initiative forms the backbone of Japan's independence in compute and data.

The Robotics Coalition and Cosmos Models

Japan’s industrial giants are lining 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, an open-model effort Nvidia started in May with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge, 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. Huang noted that Japan invented modern manufacturing and now has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.

Toyota, Vehicles, and Autonomous Systems

Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform at CES in January 2025. 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’s 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. 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.

Sovereign AI and Future Market Ambitions

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, a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion, 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. 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 doesn’t 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. According to detailed reports on TechCrunch, the Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing ¥370 trillion in public and private investment by 2040.