Japan launches national Physical AI infrastructure with NVIDIA

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and NVIDIA announced the world’s first national AI infrastructure for physical AI, dubbed the Vera Rubin AI factory. Built by the newly formed Noetra Corp., the facility will house 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 MW of data‑center capacity to power the FRONTia Project, which develops multimodal foundation models for robotics and digital‑twin applications.

Fujitsu will lead a consortium that includes robot makers Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and other industrial leaders to create a collaborative‑control platform. Using NVIDIA’s Cosmos 3 Edge, Isaac, Metropolis and other AI stacks, the partners aim to enable robots that can safely work alongside humans in factories, hospitals, logistics, and shipbuilding. A pilot test is scheduled for Fujitsu’s factory in Ishikawa in September 2026, with version 1 of the platform slated for rollout later that year and an upgraded version 2 in 2027.

Additional initiatives include a partnership with Kawasaki to develop AI‑powered shipbuilding robots, the formation of a NVIDIA Cosmos Coalition that Japanese robotics firms plan to join, and a plan to purchase up to 2.75 million NVIDIA Rubin chips with up to ¥1 trillion of government funding. These efforts collectively aim to strengthen Japan’s manufacturing competitiveness and address labor‑shortage challenges through advanced physical AI technologies.