Japan has announced a major AI infrastructure project involving Noetra and Nvidia, aiming to build what is described as the world’s first national AI infrastructure dedicated to physical AI.
The announcement sets out plans for an AI factory using 13,750 Nvidia Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, supported by sector leaders and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
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The initiative aims to strengthen Japan’s AI capabilities in sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, and telecommunications.
Noetra will establish the factory using Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, underpinned by the Nvidia DSX platform and the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking system.
This data centre installation will provide a capacity of 140 megawatts (MW) and support the training of trillion-parameter-scale AI models.
According to Nvidia, the technology behind the factory will enable open multimodal foundation models that support AI agents, robotics, digital twins, and other physical AI use cases.
The AI factory is also set to serve as the computational base for the FRONTia Project, an initiative under METI’s direction focusing on developing multimodal AI foundation models for use in robotics and physical AI.
The project brings together expertise from Japan’s manufacturing sector, real-world data resources, and technology companies.
Pretrained multimodal model weights and various AI software tools from Nvidia will be made widely available to developers and enterprises in Japan as part of the project.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution.
“Nvidia is honoured 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’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Ryosei Akazawa said: “Japan has launched the FRONTia Project, which will serve as the core of the country’s physical AI ecosystem.
“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.”
Noetra CEO Hironobu Tamba said: “Bringing physical AI into the real world requires enormous computing, data and foundational technologies, challenges no single company can solve alone.
“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.”
Noetra has secured investment from 44 companies and organisations, including Sony Group, NEC, SoftBank, and Honda Motor.
The company has created a research and development (R&D) team consisting of engineers from its core members, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Preferred Networks, and other contributors.
Noetra intends to start construction of the new AI computing centre in April 2027 with operations expected to start in June 2028.
The project will be rolled out in phases, with an initial focus on building a foundation model for language understanding and logical reasoning by the fiscal year ending in March 2027.
Full development of an omni-modal foundation model, designed to process various data types, is planned by fiscal 2028.
External staged releases of these AI models will follow, taking into account progress in research and real-world applications.
