What to watch for after Jensen Huang’s Japan visit

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang spent two days – July 15 and 16 – in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip supplier elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan, And months after visiting South Korea. He left with deals that span Japan’s technology ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies and agreements with the 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 largest manufacturers are participating. The next chapter of AI, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.

Thirty years ago, a Sega investment of $5 million helped keep nearly bankrupt Nvidia afloat; Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again – this time to build the physical AI era, starting with these three projects:

Noetra — The Japanese sovereign AI game. The country does not want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So the government brought together roughly 44 domestic companies, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda at its core, to build its own AI for robots, vehicles and factory floors. Tokyo is committed to it 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five yearsa bet on homegrown “physical AI,” basic models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. However, the hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia. The US chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory”, a massive data center packed with next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028. with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUswhich supplies 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. Noëtras plan proceeds in three phases: a reasoning model that places a heavy emphasis on Japanese language skills, starting in fiscal year 2026; an omnimodal version that will handle text, images, video and audio by 2028; and ‘Real-world Native AI’ built to run robots by 2030, released in phases to third-party Noetra developers.

The Robotics Coalition: Japan’s industrial giants are behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting the Japanese factory floor, and lots of it the best robotics in the country and production players are signing up. 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 has started Be able to with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to get involved: disclosure Cosmos 3 Edgea version of the model that runs on the Jetson Thor chips in the machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, such as Honda R&D and Omron, are now building on the tools. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a unique opportunity for Japan,” says 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.”

Toyota – cars and physical AI. Toyota uses Nvidia chips in much of its stack. It has handed over its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia Drive platform bee CES in January 2025; the newer work extends Nvidia to its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, to the software that controls its vehicles, and to systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will have advanced driver assistance systems that steer and brake but still require 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 money to support it. Japan wants to face a shrinking working population 10 million AI-equipped robots in 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical AI investments.

The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture this more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market valued at about 20 trillion yen in Tokyo, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a domestic base model to run the machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, down to the trillions of parameters, would be trained. The bet is that Japan’s factory data and manufacturing base can contribute to physical AI

Underneath the industrial cause lies a sovereign cause. While the US and China are making strides in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own computing power, and less dependence on infrastructure it has no control over. Huang appeared with Commerce Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s launch of physical AI on July 16, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi participate via video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion).) in public and private investments by 2040. Noetra’s factory – which Nvidia bills as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure” – is the clearest guess yet. Japan’s quest for independence rests, at least for now, on American chips. The economy runs on American silicon.

Within two days, Huang sat across from almost every name that matters in Japanese technology: the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply chain chefs over skewers and whiskey at a Kanda izakaya.

It’s the same script he did weeks earlier: a keynote homecoming in Taiwan, fried chickenand a deal for 50,000 GPUs last fall in Seoul. This time it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain and the chips underneath.