Forty-four of Japan's largest corporations — including Sony, SoftBank, NEC, Honda and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group — have united behind Noetra, a state-backed venture building Japan's own foundation models for "physical AI" and robotics. The consortium was selected by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and NEDO in June 2026, and began full-scale R&D this month.
Tokyo has committed an initial ¥387.3 billion (about $2.4 billion) for the current fiscal year, with up to ¥1 trillion (~$6.15 billion) pledged over five years. Noetra plans a computing cluster built on 27,500 Nvidia "Rubin" GPUs, with construction starting in April 2027 and full operation targeted for June 2028.
The roadmap moves in stages: a Japanese-language reasoning model this fiscal year, an omnimodal system handling text, images, video and audio by 2028, and by 2030 a "Real-world Native AI" designed for robots operating in physical environments. The push is tied to Japan's national AI Robotics Strategy, which aims to deploy 10 million AI-powered robots across 18 fields by 2040 to offset the country's aging population and shrinking workforce. "A domestic model is essential to sustain Japan's industrial competitiveness," Noetra CEO Hironobu Tamba said, while SoftBank's Junichi Miyagawa called secure domestic AI infrastructure "paramount to safely utilizing Japanese corporate data."