{"id":773561,"date":"2026-07-20T08:50:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/773561\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T08:50:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:50:15","slug":"what-to-watch-for-after-jensen-huangs-japan-visit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/773561\/","title":{"rendered":"What to watch for after Jensen Huang\u2019s Japan visit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days \u2014 July 15 and 16 \u2014 in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip-supply elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan,<\/a> and<\/a> months after a visit to South Korea<\/a>. He left with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI’s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it. <\/p>\n

Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment<\/a> helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again \u2014 this time to build the physical-AI era, starting with these three projects: <\/p>\n

Noetra \u2014 Japan’s sovereign-AI play. The country doesn’t want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So, the government pulled together roughly 44 domestic firms, with SoftBank, Sony,\u00a0 NEC and Honda at the core, to build its own AI for robots, vehicles and factory floors. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years<\/a>, a bet on homegrown “physical AI”,\u00a0 foundation models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. The hardware to build it, though, still comes from Nvidia. The U.S chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory”, a massive data center packed with its next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028, with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs<\/a>, delivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. Noetra’s plan runs in three stages<\/a>: a reasoning model heavy on Japanese-language skills starting in fiscal 2026; an omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio by 2028; and “Real-world Native AI” built to run robots by 2030, released to outside Noetra developers in phases. <\/p>\n

The robotics coalition \u00a0\u2014 Japan’s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s top robotics<\/a> and manufacturing players are signing on. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they \u00a0plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models, an open-model effort Nvidia started in May<\/a> with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge<\/a>, 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 building on the 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<\/a> in the company’s statement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.” <\/p>\n

Toyota \u2014 cars and physical AI. Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform<\/a> at CES in January 2025<\/a>; the newer work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, into the software that runs its vehicles, and into systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will run 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. <\/p>\n

Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to back it. Facing a shrinking workforce,<\/a> Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots<\/a> across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment<\/a>. \u00a0 <\/p>\n

The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30%<\/a> of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly \u00a520 trillion, or about $133 billion. \u00a0METI is funding a domestic foundation model to run the machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, into the trillions of parameters, would be trained. The wager is that Japan’s factory-floor data and manufacturing base can do for physical AI <\/p>\n

Underneath the industrial case is a sovereign one. As the U.S. and China pull ahead in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own compute, and less dependence on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical-AI launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi<\/a> joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing \u00a5370 trillion ($2.3 trillion<\/a>) in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra’s factory \u2014 which Nvidia bills as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure”<\/a> \u2014 is the clearest bet yet. Japan’s push for independence, at least for now, rests on American chips.ndence runs on American silicon. <\/p>\n

In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech \u2014 the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply-chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya. <\/p>\n

It’s the same playbook he ran weeks earlier \u2014 a homecoming keynote in Taiwan, fried chicken<\/a>, and a 50,000-GPU deal in Seoul last fall.<\/a> This time, it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain, and the chips underneath. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days \u2014 July 15 and 16 \u2014 in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,330035,181,507,330036,330037,3471,37039,11379,4321,74,17205],"class_list":["post-773561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anadolu-agency","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-factory-floor","tag-factory-floors","tag-japan","tag-japan-earthquake","tag-jensen-huang","tag-nvidia","tag-technology","tag-tokyo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}