Nvidia chief Jensen Huang spent two days – July 15 and 16 – in Tokyo courting Japan’s industrial elite and chip supply, weeks after a keynote speech at taiwan, and months after a visit to South Korea. He walked away with deals that span Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national artificial intelligence factory, partnerships with the country’s top robotics companies and deals with the suppliers of chip materials that power Nvidia’s next generation of artificial intelligence chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting the Japan factory, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are participating. The next chapter of artificial intelligence, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.
Thirty years ago, a Sega $5 million investment helped keep a nearly bankrupt Nvidia alive. Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again — this time to build the age of natural AI, starting with these three projects:
Noetra — Japan’s dominant AI game. The country does not want to run its factories and robots with American or Chinese artificial intelligence. So the government brought together some 44 domestic companies, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda as its core, to create its own artificial intelligence for robots, vehicles and factory floors. Tokyo is bound by 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) in five yearsa bet on homegrown “natural artificial intelligence,” models of foundations built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. The hardware to build it, however, still comes from Nvidia. The US chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory”, a massive data center filled with its next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028. with 13,750 Vera processors and 27,500 Rubin processorsyielding 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. of Noetra the design is carried out in three stages: a reasoning model that weighs Japanese language skills from FY2026. an omni-modal version that handles text, images, video and audio by 2028. and “Real-world Native AI” built to run robots by 2030, released to external Noetra developers in phases.
The Robotics Coalition — Japan’s industrial giants are lining up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting the Japan factory and lots of it leading robotics in the country and construction players sign. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they plan to leverage Nvidia’s Cosmos models, an open model effort started by Nvidia. May with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, revealing Cosmos 3 Edgea version of the model that works with the Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some are already testing a common control system. others, such as Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the tools now. “The next frontier of artificial intelligence is the natural world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” said Huang he said in the company announcement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the era of smart industries.”
Toyota — cars and natural artificial intelligence. Toyota uses Nvidia chips in much of its stack. Committed next generation vehicles to Nvidia vehicles Movement platform at CES in January 2025; the newest work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, the software that runs its vehicles and systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will feature advanced driver assistance that 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 natural artificial intelligence at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to support it. Facing a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million robots equipped with AI in 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private natural AI investment.
Bigger game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30% of the global robotic AI market by 2040, a market that Tokyo values at around ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a homegrown foundational model to run the machines, and the Nvidia-powered Noetra factory is where models of this scale, on trillions of parameters, will be trained. The bet is that Japan’s data and factory manufacturing base can make natural AI
Under the industrial case is a dominant case. As the US and China move into large-scale artificial intelligence, Tokyo wants its own data, its own computing and less reliance on infrastructure it does not control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside Trade Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s natural artificial intelligence launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi video participation. Takaichi’s management has made artificial intelligence and semiconductors the focus of a growth plan that is chasing ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra’s factory — which Nvidia bills 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. ndence runs on American silicon.
In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese technology—the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki for lunch and dozens of supply chain heads over skewers and whiskey at a Kanda izakaya.
It’s the same book that ran weeks earlier — a keynote speech back in Taiwan, fried chickenand a 50,000 GPU deal in Seoul last fall. This time, it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain and the chips underneath.
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