Nvidia stock was slipping early Thursday, even as the chip maker promoted Japan as the next big market for its artificial-intelligence processors.
The shares were down 2.9% at $206.41 in early trading. The move was broadly in line with the wider market as chip stocks slumped again, with the PHLX Semiconductor Index down 3.5%.
Amid doubts about the sustainability of Big Tech spending on AI hardware, Nvidia could do with more customers stepping up. So it’s good news that the company said Thursday it would supply AI chips and computing infrastructure for foundational models to Noetra, a Japanese industry alliance led by SoftBank Group, Sony Group, Honda Motor and big companies.
Noetra will initially install 13,750 Nvidia Vera central processing units and 27,500 Nvidia Rubin graphics processing units, delivering 140 megawatts of data-center capacity. Financial details weren’t disclosed.
It’s a small commitment against the hundreds of thousands of chips Nvidia sells to its biggest American corporate customers. But Nvidia’s revenue from so-called sovereign AI, meaning government-backed efforts to produce independent AI technology, more than tripled year over year to over $30 billion in fiscal 2026 and the company is counting on bigger things in the future.
Separately, Nvidia said it was working with several Japanese companies on physical AI—a term that covers robots, autonomous driving, and other real-world applications of the technology—as it introduced two new supercomputing modules designed for advanced robotics. Nvidia said the T3000 and T2000 were new modules based on its Thor computing architecture to enable mass-market robotics
Although robotics is currently a small business compared with AI data centers, Barron’s has noted that Wall Street is betting on explosive growth. RBC analyst Tom Narayan projects some 350 million robots will be sold annually, at an estimated $25,000 each, by 2050. That would be a market worth $9 trillion.
Nvidia was a recent Barron’s stock pick when it was trading around $226.
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