Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's Japan visit yields deals in physical AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited Tokyo on July 15 and 16, meeting Japan's industrial and chip-supply elite. The trip resulted in deals spanning the country's entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with leading robotics companies, and agreements with chip-material suppliers that power Nvidia's next-generation AI chips.

Huang emphasized that the next chapter of AI belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it. Thirty years ago, a $5 million investment from Sega helped keep a nearly bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today, the two need each other again to build the physical AI era.

One project is Noetra, Japan's sovereign AI initiative. The government brought together about 44 domestic firms, including SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda, to develop its own AI for robots, vehicles, and factories. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years to homegrown "physical AI" foundation models. The hardware comes from Nvidia, which is building a "Vera Rubin AI factory" — a massive data center packed with its next-gen chips, expected to launch in 2028 with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts.

The second project is a robotics coalition. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and robotics group AIRoA plan to build on Nvidia's Cosmos models. In Tokyo, Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a version that runs on Jetson Thor chips inside machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others like Honda R&D and Omron are building on the tools now.

The third project involves Toyota, which uses Nvidia chips across its stack. At CES in January 2025, Toyota committed its next-gen vehicles to Nvidia's Drive platform; newer work extends Nvidia into manufacturing, software, and traffic reading systems.

Huang's visit placed physical AI at the center of Japan's industrial strategy. With a shrinking workforce, Japan aims for 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment. The country's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets over 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, valued at about ¥20 trillion ($133 billion). METI is funding a domestic foundation model, and Noetra's Nvidia-powered factory would train such models.

Underneath the industrial case is a sovereign one: as the U.S. and China pull ahead, Japan wants its own data, compute, and less dependence on foreign infrastructure. Huang appeared alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government's physical-AI launch on July 16, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan seeking ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) in investment by 2040.

In two days, Huang met with nearly every major name in Japanese tech — CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply-chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya. It's the same playbook he ran in Taiwan and Seoul: this time Tokyo's turn, with robots, supply chain, and chips.