Nvidia chief Jensen Huang spent July 15 and 16 in Tokyo locking down agreements that span Japan's entire technology stack, from a national AI factory to partnerships with the country's leading robotics firms and chip-material suppliers. The deals position Nvidia at the heart of Japan's push to dominate what Huang calls "physical AI": artificial intelligence built to run factories, vehicles, and robots.
The trip came just weeks after a similar high-profile visit to Taiwan, and it followed the same playbook. Huang met with the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki over lunch, then hosted dozens of supply-chain executives at a Kanda izakaya. The message was consistent. AI's next chapter belongs to machines, and Japan, with its deep manufacturing heritage, is where Huang wants that chapter written.
A National AI Factory Built on Nvidia Silicon
Japan does not want its factories and robots running on American or Chinese AI models. So Tokyo assembled roughly 44 domestic companies, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda at the core, to build homegrown foundation models for machines. The government is committing significant funding to the effort, betting that Japan can own the software brain even if the hardware still comes from abroad.
That hardware is Nvidia's. The company is building what it calls a "Vera Rubin AI factory," a massive data center packed with next-generation chips expected to launch in 2028. The facility will deliver 140 megawatts of compute power. Noetra, the consortium leading Japan's domestic AI push, will oversee the project and has laid out a phased roadmap: a Japanese-language reasoning model starting in fiscal 2026, an omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio by 2028, and "Real-world Native AI" built to run robots by 2030.
Japan's Industrial Giants Sign On
The factory floor is where Nvidia is placing its biggest bet. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota, and the robotics group AIRoA all plan to build on Nvidia's Cosmos models. Cosmos is an open-model effort Nvidia started with global AI labs, and in Tokyo the company unveiled a version that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves.
Some partners are already testing shared control systems. Honda R&D and Omron are actively building on the tools now. The breadth of participation matters. Japan's robotics sector has long been fragmented, with each major manufacturer running proprietary systems. A shared Nvidia-backed platform could, for the first time, create enough common ground to let smaller firms and startups build applications that work across multiple brands of industrial hardware.
"The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan," Huang said in a company statement. "Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries."
Toyota Deepens Its Nvidia Ties
Toyota already uses Nvidia chips across much of its technology stack. The automaker committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia's platform at CES earlier this year, and the new agreements extend that relationship into manufacturing. Toyota is using Nvidia-powered simulations to design production lines, and its vehicles will run advanced driver assistance systems that steer and brake while still requiring a human driver. That is a more conservative approach than the fully autonomous systems being pursued by Waymo and Tesla, but it reflects Toyota's risk-averse engineering culture and Japan's regulatory environment.
The Sovereignty Play
Underneath the industrial strategy is a political calculation. As the United States and China pull ahead in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own compute, and less dependence on infrastructure it does not control. Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture a significant share of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion.
Huang appeared alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government's physical-AI launch on July 16. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing massive public and private investment by 2040. Noetra's Nvidia-powered factory is the clearest bet yet. Japan's push for independence, at least for now, runs on American silicon.
The tension is obvious. Tokyo wants sovereign AI, but it needs Nvidia's chips to build it. That dependency gives Huang enormous leverage, and he is using it to embed his company into every layer of Japan's industrial future. Watch for how Japan's government responds if Washington ever restricts the flow of those chips.