Japan launches Vera Rubin AI factory with NVIDIA: 27,500 Rubin GPUs, 140MW for FRONTia multimodal robotics models

NVIDIA and Noetra Corp. announced the world's first national AI infrastructure dedicated to physical AI: a Vera Rubin AI factory with 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs delivering 140 megawatts of compute based on the NVIDIA DSX platform. The facility will form the computing backbone of Japan's FRONTia Project ("Development of Multimodal Foundation Models with a View to AI Robotics and Physical AI"), launched by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The AI factory will develop open multimodal foundation models powering AI agents, digital twins, robotics and physical AI applications, with pretrained weights and software (Nemotron, Cosmos, Isaac GR00T, NeMo) broadly distributed to domestic model developers and enterprises.

The initiative is embedded in Japan's official AI Robotics Strategy (released March 2026), which targets 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040—a $133 billion opportunity. Vera Rubin NVL72 racks use NVIDIA DSX reference design plus Spectrum-X Ethernet, BlueField DPUs, and tightly codesigned silicon/systems/software to maximize token throughput per megawatt and operational efficiency. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with CEOs of Fujitsu, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, FANUC, and Yaskawa (Japan's robotics backbone) to signal full supply-chain commitment. The partnership also includes collaboration with Fujitsu and RIKEN, which deployed a separate 1,600 Blackwell GPU supercomputer (RIKYU) for open foundation model development.

For infrastructure builders and enterprises targeting manufacturing robotics, the Japan DSX factory represents a geopolitical shift: tier-1 industrialized nation building sovereign multimodal AI capacity outside U.S.-China axis. The 140MW scale enables trillion-parameter model training, positioning Japan as a producer of open robotics foundation models rather than solely a consumer of U.S. frontier labs. This infrastructure play underpins Japanese manufacturing's competitive advantage in physical AI deployment and labor augmentation.