Overview
- On Thursday, July 16, Nvidia and newly formed Noetra Corp. announced plans to build a 140‑megawatt AI factory that will serve as the compute core for Japan’s FRONTia program.
- The facility is specified to house 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs arranged in about 382 Vera Rubin NVL72 racks to train large multimodal foundation models for robotics, digital twins and industrial automation.
- Noetra, a consortium led by SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda that includes 44 corporate backers, won a NEDO tender with initial funding of ¥387.3 billion and a conditional five‑year envelope up to ¥1 trillion subject to annual stage‑gate reviews.
- Nvidia’s CEO said Vera and Rubin are in production and that large volumes are incoming, but neither Nvidia nor Noetra gave a fixed deployment date and reporting places construction in 2027 with operations targeted for June 2028 as a provisional schedule.
- The project is meant to secure domestic control of physical AI, will boost demand for foundry, memory and data‑center suppliers, and could speed robotics deployment in factories and care settings as Japan copes with long‑term labor shortages.