Jensen Huang in Tokyo: Japan Bets on Physical AI

Tokyo on Huang's Agenda

Over two consecutive days in July, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, made his way through the heart of Tokyo's industrial and tech districts. This was no mere diplomatic tour — the visit arrived loaded with deals that strike at the core of the Japanese economy: a national AI factory, alliances with leading robotics companies, and agreements with suppliers of key materials used in Nvidia's next generation of processors. The message was clear: AI is leaving the screen and moving onto the factory floor, and Japan intends to be at the forefront of that shift.

Noutera: Japan's Digital Sovereignty Play

Japan has no interest in seeing its factories and robots run entirely on American or Chinese AI models. With that in mind, the Japanese government has established a coalition of roughly 44 domestic companies — led by SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda — under a new entity known as "Noutera," backed by government funding of up to one trillion yen (approximately $6.2 billion) over five years.

Noutera aims to develop foundation models purpose-built for operating machinery, vehicles, and factories, according to a three-phase roadmap:

• A reasoning model centered on the Japanese language by 2026.
• A multimodal model capable of processing text, images, video, and audio by 2028.
• "Physical world-native" AI designed to operate robots by 2030.

The computing infrastructure will be provided by Nvidia, which will construct a large-scale AI factory housing 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin-series GPUs, with a capacity of 140 megawatts, slated for launch in 2028.

The Robotics Alliance: Cosmos Enters the Japanese Factory

Japan's top robotics and manufacturing companies have announced plans to build on Nvidia's Cosmos models — an open-source model suite the company launched in May. Among the most prominent members joining this alliance:

• Fanuc, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries for industrial robotics.
• Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC in technology and data.
• Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and the AIRoA robotics consortium.

During the visit, Nvidia unveiled "Cosmos 3 Edge," an optimized release designed to run directly inside machines via Jetson Thor chips, enhancing on-site processing capabilities without the need to send data to the cloud. Huang remarked: "The unique opportunity Japan has is to reinvent the manufacturing it has excelled at building for decades."

Toyota: From Cars to Production Lines

Nvidia's partnership with Toyota extends well beyond the autonomous vehicle collaboration announced in early 2025. The cooperation has expanded to encompass production line simulation and design, software for managing vehicles, and traffic monitoring systems. Toyota takes a more cautious approach to driving automation, focusing on advanced driver assistance systems that keep a human behind the wheel, rather than pursuing full self-driving as other companies do.

The Broader Strategic Bet

Japan is acutely aware that it faces deep structural challenges, most notably a shrinking workforce. Against this backdrop, the country has set an ambitious goal of deploying ten million AI-powered robots across 18 sectors by 2040, supported by investments exceeding $65 billion. Japan's AI and robotics strategy aims to capture more than 30% of the global market for this sector within the next decade — a market valued at approximately $133 billion.

More significant than the numbers, however, is the sovereignty dimension: as the United States and China race ahead in large-scale AI, Japan wants to own its own data and computing capabilities and reduce its dependence on infrastructure it does not control. The irony of the moment is that this Japanese digital sovereignty is currently being built on American-made chips.

In just two days, Huang brought the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki to the same table, and held discussions with dozens of supply chain leaders. The same playbook he ran in Taiwan and Seoul — but this time, the stakes are higher and the ambitions run deeper.

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