Japan announces investment of 1 trillion yen: deploy 10 million AI robots across 18 industries by 2040 to address labor shortage.

The Japanese government has officially commissioned Noetra—an alliance formed by companies including SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and others—to put up to 1 trillion yen of public funds to deploy 10 million AI robots across 18 industries by 2040, filling an increasingly severe structural labor shortage.
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• The national answer forced by labor shortages
• SoftBank, Sony, and Honda tied together to build it
• The ceiling is not a guarantee

One trillion yen—this is the figure Tokyo is betting on robots this week. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) have formally commissioned Noetra, an alliance formed by SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and other companies, together with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Between fiscal years 2026 and 2030, they will develop an AI model meant to support 10 million robots across 18 industries, with a target go-live year of 2040.

The first round of money is already in place: about $2.3 billion in commissioned funds for the current fiscal year, drawn from a ¥387.3 billion appropriation, financed via GX economic transition bonds. Going forward, each year’s budget must be negotiated separately.

The national answer forced by labor shortages

Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Akira Akazawa, said plainly that this initiative must “vigorously promote social implementation” in industries such as food services, food manufacturing, and healthcare.

Put simply, the plan is to put robots into the industries where labor is most scarce—and where it is also the hardest to make up the gap with foreign workers. We know Japan’s aging pace is among the fastest in the world, and with immigration policies tightened for the long term, large swathes of the economy have fallen into structural labor shortages. Over the past decade, no real solution has been found—so the country has had to limp along with overtime and outsourcing.

The core of the commissioned development this time is an “embodied AI” model— a multimodal foundation model that can read language, images, video, and sensor data. In simple terms, it’s meant to let robots truly “understand a space and act within it,” rather than merely executing fixed actions prewritten by engineers.

Japan is not starting from scratch. In long-term care, disaster response, manufacturing, and even the decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, practical robot experience has been accumulated over many years. What this project aims to do is to consolidate these scattered experiences across various industries into a set of exportable products—not just a domestic patch that gets used and then discarded. That’s also the confidence behind Tokyo’s bold claim to cover 18 industries.

SoftBank, Sony, and Honda tied together to build it

Noetra is currently controlled by SoftBank (SoftBank), NEC, the Sony Group, and Honda. Fujitsu and Rakuten are reportedly evaluating whether to join. The number of investing companies is expected to expand to 44, spanning multiple fields including automobiles, electronics, finance, and logistics. SoftBank engineers develop the same model side by side with researchers from Preferred Networks and AIST—essentially putting computing companies, research institutions, and hardware manufacturers in the same office.

This is a typical Japanese industry playbook: instead of betting on a single company trying to catch up to frontier models on its own, the state takes the lead and ties the companies that are already building “the hardware this model will run on” into a single commissioned document. Honda provides the robot body, Sony provides image sensors, and SoftBank provides computing power and engineering teams. The model and hardware are not developed first and then matched afterward—they grow at the same time, which is completely different from the Silicon Valley sequence of training a model first and then finding scenarios to deploy it.

The ceiling is not a guarantee

Tokyo didn’t write the check with no strings attached. The 1 trillion yen is a five-year cap; only the funding for the first two years is truly locked in. After that, disbursements each year must pass stage-gate reviews. In simple terms, for Noetra to get next year’s budget, it must produce usable results each year; if progress falls behind, Tokyo can pull back at any time without having to shoulder the political cost of a stalled project, and without having to wait until 2040 to admit failure.

If Noetra delivers a usable model, the list of investors is likely to far exceed the current four companies; if not, this funding structure has already been written to provide Tokyo an exit rationale, and the outside world may not even realize it until the official announcement of their withdrawal.