Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent two days in Tokyo on July 15 and 16, 2026, meeting with Japan’s industrial and technology leadership and leaving with a series of deals spanning the country’s tech ecosystem — including a national AI data center, a robotics coalition, and expanded work with Toyota.
The centerpiece agreement involves Noetra, a consortium of roughly 44 Japanese companies anchored by SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda. Backed by up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) from the Japanese government over five years, Noetra will build a sovereign AI platform for robots, vehicles, and factory floors. Nvidia will construct what it calls “the world’s first national AI infrastructure” — a data center housing 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs delivering 140 megawatts, expected to launch in 2028. Noetra plans to develop a Japanese-language reasoning model starting in fiscal 2026, an omni-modal version by 2028, and robot-ready “Real-world Native AI” by 2030.
On the robotics side, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and robotics group AIRoA all said they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models. In Tokyo, Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a version designed to run on its Jetson Thor chips inside machines themselves. Honda R&D and Omron are already building on the platform.
Toyota’s involvement extends Nvidia’s Drive platform — committed at CES in January 2025 — into manufacturing simulations, vehicle software, and traffic-reading systems. Toyota’s approach focuses on advanced driver assistance that still requires a human driver.
The deals carry strategic weight beyond commerce. Japan faces a shrinking workforce and has set a target of 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, supported by $65 billion in public and private investment. The government’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March 2026, aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040 — a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion ($133 billion). Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who joined Huang’s July 16 government appearance by video, has placed AI and semiconductors at the center of a growth plan targeting ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) in investment by 2040.
While Japan’s strategy is framed around reducing dependence on foreign-controlled infrastructure, the compute powering it remains American — built on Nvidia silicon.
Source: TechCrunch