Noetra Corp., a government-backed consortium led by SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda, will deploy 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs to support multimodal foundation models for AI robotics.

METI has budgeted about ¥387.3 billion for fiscal 2026, with up to ¥1 trillion over five years to fund the national project, aiming for construction in 2027 and operations starting by mid-2028.

Key risks include potential execution delays as Noetra forms in 2026, a first foundation model planned within the current fiscal year, and the need to manage power, grid capacity, while balancing sovereignty goals with dependence on a single vendor (NVIDIA).

Japan is pursuing a sovereign, manufacturing-centered AI strategy that treats compute, data, and robotics as national strategic assets, testing whether physical AI can translate industrial advantage into sustained economic leadership.

The initiative leverages Japan’s industrial base—leaders in robotics and electronics—to provide data and deployment channels for physical AI.

The facility will run on NVIDIA’s DSX platform, using NVL72 racks, Spectrum-X networking, and BlueField DPUs, supporting training of trillion-parameter-scale models.

Noetra emphasizes sovereign compute and domestic data, aiming to reduce reliance on US or Chinese AI stacks while using NVIDIA’s ecosystem (Cosmos, Isaac, Omniverse, Nemotron, NeMo).

Japan and NVIDIA unveiled a plan to build a 140 MW Vera Rubin AI factory as part of the national physical AI initiative.

The project targets capturing more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, with a roughly $133 billion opportunity and deployment of 10 million AI-powered robots across 18 sectors.

Japan’s broader ecosystem includes expanding Cosmos Coalition memberships and developing edge models (Cosmos 3 Edge) and Metropolis libraries to accelerate Cosmos-based AI in robotics, manufacturing, and smart facilities.

Top collaborators and beneficiaries include NVIDIA, SoftBank, Sony, Honda R&D, FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Kubota, NEC, Hitachi, Preferred Networks, and RIKEN’s AI-for-science systems (RIKYU and ROQUO).