Japan to Launch National AI Infrastructure With 140-Megawatt NVIDIA Factory for Physical AI

METI partners with NVIDIA and Noetra to build a national AI factory with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, targeting manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare applications under the FRONTia Project.

TOKYO — Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is partnering with NVIDIA and Noetra Corp. to build what officials call the world’s first national AI infrastructure for physical AI, deploying 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs in a 140-megawatt data center.

The NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory, built by Noetra using the NVIDIA DSX platform and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, will provide computing resources for METI’s FRONTia Project — formal title: “Development of Multimodal Foundation Models with a View to AI Robotics and Physical AI.” The program aims to create open multimodal foundation models for AI agents, digital twins, robotics, and physical AI applications across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and telecommunications. Pretrained model weights will be available to domestic developers alongside NVIDIA software tools including Nemotron, Cosmos, and Isaac GR00T.

METI Minister Ryosei Akazawa said the program would “build highly reliable multimodal foundation models and contribute to solving global social challenges” by combining Japan’s manufacturing expertise with global technology partners. Noetra CEO Hironobu Tamba said the company would “advance Japan-developed multimodal foundation models and accelerate the deployment of physical AI across Japanese industries.”

Why it matters: Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets more than 30 percent of the global AI robotics market by 2040 — an estimated ¥19.5 trillion ($133 billion) opportunity. The AI factory will train trillion-parameter-scale models as infrastructure expands.