Japan launches the domestic AI project “Noetra”: Nvidia supplies 27.5k Rubin GPUs; 44 company groups including Sony and SoftBank participate

Mars Finance reports that on July 17, Japan’s domestic multimodal foundation model R&D project “Noetra” officially kicked off on July 16. The core enterprises include Sony Group, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda. A total of 44 companies and organizations are contributing funds to participate, 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 and Preferred Networks will also join the R&D.

The project is part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Multimodal Foundation Model Development Program for AI Robots and Physical AI” (which NVIDIA officially refers to as the FRONTia Project). Its goal is to build Japan-made foundation models for physical AI scenarios such as manufacturing sites and robots, rather than merely adding another Japanese conversational AI.

On the hardware side, Noetra will partner with NVIDIA to build a computing platform equipped with approximately 27,500 of the latest Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs. It will adopt the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and DSX platform architecture, with a designed power capacity of 140 megawatts. Construction is planned to start in April 2027, with production scheduled to begin in June 2028, at which time it will become Japan’s largest AI compute infrastructure.

The R&D roadmap will be advanced in three phases. Beginning in FY2026, development will focus on inference foundation models centered on AI agents and natural language processing. In FY2028, it will achieve an all-modality foundation model with seamless integration of text, images, video, and audio. In FY2030, it will enable real-world native AI that understands space and physical properties, with final applications in fields including manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and communications.