Japan is standing up the world's first national AI factory dedicated to physical AI. NVIDIA and Tokyo-based Noetra Corp. announced on July 16 that they will build an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory in Japan with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts of data-center capacity dedicated to the country's national physical-AI ecosystem.
METI's FRONTia Project gets its silicon backbone
Backed by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the factory will provide the computing foundation for the FRONTia Project — formally titled "Development of Multimodal Foundation Models with a View to AI Robotics and Physical AI." The build combines NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks on the NVIDIA DSX platform, Spectrum-X Ethernet fabric and BlueField DPUs, and will train trillion-parameter physical-AI models with pretrained weights shared broadly across Japanese enterprises and startups.
Chasing $133B in AI robotics
Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040 — an estimated $133 billion opportunity. Noetra will make Japan-developed multimodal foundation models available alongside NVIDIA Nemotron, Cosmos, Isaac GR00T and NeMo libraries. "Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution," said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, echoing the sentiment of Japan's METI minister Ryosei Akazawa.
Part of a wider Japan+NVIDIA push
The Noetra deal is one of several Japan announcements NVIDIA rolled out this week alongside Cosmos 3 availability on Jetson Thor, Nemotron open-model adoption by SoftBank and Stockmark, and a robotics ecosystem push with domestic OEMs. It also parallels NVIDIA's Toyota expansion into smart-city and factory AI announced on July 15 and its multiyear SK hynix memory pact. Combined, the moves position Japan as the second sovereign compute pole after the United States for physical AI training runs.
Reporting based on coverage from NVIDIA, GlobeNewswire, and StockTitan.