Overview
- Noetra and Nvidia announced the plan on Thursday, July 16, specifying 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs organized into 382 NVL72 racks for a 140 megawatt facility.
- Noetra is a new consortium led by SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda that, together with research institute AIST, won a NEDO tender and has initial funding of ¥387.3 billion with up to ¥1 trillion available over five years subject to annual reviews.
- Deployment will be phased as Rubin reaches volume production, which Nvidia says begins in the second half of 2026, but some reports cite an April 2027 construction start and a June 2028 operational target while other accounts give no fixed timeline.
- The factory is intended to train open multimodal foundation models for robotics, digital twins and industrial automation under a roadmap that targets reasoning models in fiscal 2026, omni-modal models by fiscal 2028, and 'real-world native AI' by fiscal 2030, with pretrained weights shared to domestic developers.
- The program will create large demand for chip packaging, high-bandwidth memory, power and networking infrastructure and faces execution risks from supply chains, export controls and the program’s stage-gate funding reviews.