NVIDIA is working with Noetra to build an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory in Japan, using 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs for physical AI applications. Backed by Japanese AI and industry leaders, the project is described as the world’s first national AI infrastructure built for physical AI, spanning manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and telecommunications.
The AI factory will use NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks built on the NVIDIA DSX platform, connected through NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. The facility will deliver 140 megawatts of data center capacity and will also include NVIDIA BlueField DPUs.
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory will provide the computing foundation for Japan’s FRONTia Project, titled “Development of Multimodal Foundation Models with a View to AI Robotics and Physical AI,” launched by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The project combines the country’s manufacturing expertise and industrial data with technology from NVIDIA and other partners to develop multimodal foundation models for physical AI.
Noetra’s pretrained model weights will be made available to domestic model developers and enterprises, alongside software including NVIDIA Nemotron, NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open models and NVIDIA NeMo libraries.
“Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is honored to partner with Japan and its industrial leaders to build the AI infrastructure that will power the country’s industries, its economy and a new generation of innovation.”
“Japan has launched the FRONTia Project, which will serve as the core of the country’s physical AI ecosystem,” said Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry. “By fostering collaboration between Japan and leading global innovators – including NVIDIA – and leveraging Japan’s strengths, such as its onsite expertise and manufacturing technology infrastructure, we will build highly reliable multimodal foundation models and contribute to solving global social challenges.”
“Bringing physical AI into the real world requires enormous computing, data and foundational technologies – challenges no single company can solve alone,” said Hironobu Tamba, CEO of Noetra. “Together with partners across Japan and around the world, Noetra will advance Japan-developed multimodal foundation models and accelerate the deployment of physical AI across Japanese industries by broadly sharing the results of our research.”
Advancing Japan’s Physical AI Ambitions
Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy sets a goal for the country to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, an opportunity estimated at $133 billion. METI is advancing a multimodal foundation model program for robotics and physical AI as part of that strategy.
Source: NVIDIA
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, designs and manufactures graphics processing units, systems on chips, networking hardware, and AI intelligence software such as CUDA. Its products serve industries including gaming, data centers, autonomous vehicles, professional visualization, robotics, health care, and energy. The company introduced the GPU in 1999 and later expanded into accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. In gaming, its GPUs support high-performance rendering, while in AI and high-performance computing, its systems provide the infrastructure for training and deploying large-scale models. NVIDIA also develops tools for robotics and autonomous driving.