Japan launches domestic AI project "Noetra": NVIDIA will supply 27,500 Rubin GPUs, with 44 corporate groups including Sony and SoftBank participating.

The Japanese domestic multimodal foundation model development project "Noetra" officially launched on July 16. Core enterprises include Sony Group, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda, with a total of 44 companies and groups contributing to the initiative, covering a wide range of industries such as manufacturing, finance, logistics, and communications. Engineers from institutions including the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Preferred Networks will also join the R&D. This project is part of the "Multimodal Foundation Model Development Project for AI Robots and Physical AI" promoted by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), officially named the FRONTia Project by NVIDIA. Its goal is to build a Japanese domestic foundation model for physical AI scenarios like manufacturing sites and robots, rather than just a Japanese-language conversational AI. At the hardware level, Noetra will collaborate with NVIDIA to build a computing platform equipped with approximately 27,500 latest Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, adopting NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks and DSX platform architecture, with a designed power capacity of 140 megawatts. Construction is scheduled to start in April 2027 and operations to launch in June 2028, when it will become Japan’s largest AI computing infrastructure. The R&D roadmap is divided into three phases: starting from fiscal 2026, developing an inference foundation model centered on AI agents and natural language processing; achieving a full multimodal foundation model that seamlessly integrates text, images, video, and audio in fiscal 2028; and realizing real-world native AI that understands spatial and physical attributes in fiscal 2030, with final applications spanning manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and communications.