NVIDIA's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, recently announced a series of significant cooperation agreements with the Japanese government and domestic industries during a visit to Japan. The company will fully participate in Japan's "Sovereign AI" infrastructure development and "Physical AI" industry planning, aiming to deepen its presence in the Japanese market through technology exports.
Jensen Huang delivered a speech in Japan at an industry summit in Tokyo, where the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and NVIDIA jointly unveiled a national-level artificial intelligence project named "Noetra." This project is a consortium formed by 44 major Japanese manufacturing and technology firms, including SoftBank Group, Sony, Honda, NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu. It plans for a government investment of approximately 1 trillion yen over the next five years to construct a large-scale computing center in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture. The center is scheduled to become operational in 2028 and is expected to deploy about 27,500 of NVIDIA's next-generation "Rubin" architecture graphics processing units (GPUs). These will be used to develop domestic multimodal large language models, with a focus on empowering industrial automation, robotics, and automotive manufacturing.
Concurrently, NVIDIA announced a further expansion of its strategic partnership with SoftBank Group. SoftBank is building Japan's largest AI supercomputer by computing power, based on NVIDIA's Blackwell and Grace Blackwell chip architectures. It will also pilot AI-enabled Radio Access Network (AI-RAN) technology over 5G networks to establish a foundational computing network across Japan. Furthermore, NVIDIA has secured agreements with leading Japanese industrial and manufacturing companies such as Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Toyota Motor. The collaboration aims to integrate physical simulation platforms with industrial robots to accelerate the transformation of smart factories and automated production lines.
In his remarks, Huang emphasized the strategic importance of data and computing sovereignty for national economic security, stating that developing "Sovereign AI" tailored to local languages and industrial processes will be a core component of future digital infrastructure. Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Akazawa Ryosho, commented that combining Japan's advanced manufacturing expertise with cutting-edge computing power will help solidify domestic industrial competitiveness and alleviate labor shortages stemming from an aging population.
Analysts note that in the context of losing access to some major overseas markets due to U.S. export controls, NVIDIA is accelerating its strategic pivot towards allied markets like Europe and Japan. The company aims to drive hardware infrastructure sales by promoting the concept of "Sovereign AI." However, it remains to be seen whether Japan's domestic AI ecosystem can effectively utilize the massive computing power and whether the related industrial applications will be implemented as planned.
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