Nvidia boss Jensen Huang spent two days (July 15-16) in Tokyo courting Japan’s industrial and chip supplier elite, weeks after a keynote speech in Taiwan and months after a visit to South Korea. It left with deals that span Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and deals with chip materials suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factories, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are getting on board. The next chapter of AI, Huang said, belongs to factories, robots and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.

Thirty years ago, a $5 million investment in Sega helped keep a nearly bankrupt Nvidia afloat; Today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again, this time to build the era of physical AI, starting with these three projects:

Noetra — Japan’s sovereign-AI game. The country does not want to run its factories and robots with American or Chinese AI. So the government brought together about 44 domestic companies, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda at the center, to build their own artificial intelligence for robots, vehicles and factories. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years, a bet on local “physical AI,” basic models created to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. However, the hardware to build it still comes from Nvidia. The American chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory,” a massive data center packed with next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028, with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, producing 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort and plans to build the data center. Noetra’s plan is developed in three stages: a Japanese language skills-based reasoning model starting in fiscal year 2026; an omnimodal version that handles text, images, video and audio by 2028; and “real-world native AI” built to run robots by 2030, released to third-party Noetra developers in phases.

The robotics coalition: Japan’s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factories, and many of the country’s biggest robotics and manufacturing players are getting on board. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models, an open-model effort that Nvidia started in May with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, introducing the Cosmos 3 Edge, a version of the model that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are taking advantage of these tools now. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” Huang said in the company’s statement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the era of smart industries.”

Toyota: automobiles and physical artificial intelligence. Toyota uses Nvidia chips in much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform at CES in January 2025; The latest work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, to the software that runs its vehicles and to the systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will feature advanced driver assistance, which 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 physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is investing to support it. Faced with a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots in 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private investments in physical AI.

The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, published in March, aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values ​​at about 20 trillion yen, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a national baseline model to run the machines, and the Nvidia-powered Noetra factory is where models of that scale, in trillions of parameters, would be trained. The bet is that data from Japan’s factories and manufacturing base can be used for physical AI.

Behind the industrial argument there is a sovereign argument. As the United States and China advance large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own computing and less reliance on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside Commerce Minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical AI launch, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi joined by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan that seeks 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion) in public and private investments by 2040. The Noetra factory, which Nvidia calls “the world’s first national AI infrastructure,” is the clearest bet yet. Japan’s push toward independence, at least for now, relies on American chips. Defense depends on American silicon.

In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every big name in Japanese tech: the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply chain bosses over skewers and whiskey at a Kanda izakaya.

It’s the same playbook he used weeks before: a welcome speech in Taiwan, fried chicken, and 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 below.