On July 16, 2026, NVIDIA announced with Noetra Corp. and the Japanese government what it called the world’s first national AI infrastructure for physical AI. The centerpiece is an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory comprising 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts of data center capacity built on Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, the NVIDIA DSX platform, and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking.
The initiative is supported by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and will provide the computing foundation for Japan’s FRONTia Project, which aims to develop multimodal foundation models for AI robotics and physical AI. The infrastructure will serve industries including manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and telecommunications, producing open multimodal foundation models for AI agents, digital twins, and robotics applications. The announcement came during CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Japan, where industrial giants including Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries signaled intent to join a broader physical AI coalition.
Huang framed the effort in industrial-policy terms: “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution.” Japan has stated an ambition to capture 30 percent of the global AI robotics market by 2040, an opportunity the release estimated at $133 billion. The deal is a template for the sovereign AI infrastructure model NVIDIA has been promoting: a national government, a domestic operator, and NVIDIA hardware combined into state-backed compute capacity aimed at a specific industrial goal.