Japan and NVIDIA launch national AI infrastructure
NVIDIA and Japan are launching national AI infrastructure for physical AI and robotics.
Japan is moving to build what NVIDIA describes as the world’s first national AI infrastructure for physical AI, in partnership with Noetra and supported by government and industry leaders.
The initiative is designed to strengthen Japan’s AI ecosystem across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, telecommunications and other industrial sectors.
Noetra will establish an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory using 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs.
NVIDIA said the facility will deliver 140 megawatts of data-centre capacity and will be based on its DSX platform.
The AI factory will support the development of open multimodal foundation models for AI agents, digital twins, robotics and other physical AI applications.
It will provide the computing foundation for Japan’s FRONTia Project, launched by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
The project aims to combine Japan’s manufacturing expertise, real-world industrial data and international technology partnerships to develop reliable multimodal foundation models for robotics and physical AI.
Pretrained weights from Noetra’s multimodal foundation models will be made available to domestic model developers and enterprises, alongside NVIDIA software tools for agentic AI, robotics and model development.
NVIDIA said the infrastructure will support Japan’s wider AI robotics strategy, which aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040.
As the AI factory expands, it is expected to support trillion-parameter-scale model training and give organisations in Japan access to advanced AI computing capacity.
Why does it matter?
The initiative shows how national AI strategies are increasingly tied to compute infrastructure, industrial data and sector-specific foundation models. For Japan, physical AI connects AI policy with manufacturing, robotics, logistics and healthcare, areas where domestic expertise and trusted infrastructure could become strategic advantages. The project also highlights the growing role of private chip and platform providers in national AI capacity, raising longer-term questions about sovereignty, dependency and who controls the infrastructure behind industrial AI.