Japan just placed one of the biggest single-nation chip orders in AI history. The country’s newly created Noetra Corp. will deploy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs to build a national AI infrastructure purpose-built for robotics and physical AI applications, backed by an initial government subsidy of roughly ¥387.3 billion, or about $2.4B.
The project is designed to go live by June 2028 as a 140-megawatt data center. Japan’s government has outlined a five-year support plan totaling up to ¥1 trillion to ensure the initiative reaches critical mass.
What Japan is actually building
Noetra Corp.’s corporate partners include SoftBank, NEC, Sony Group, Honda, and Toyota’s Preferred Networks. Each of these companies will play a role in developing foundational AI models specifically designed for Japan’s manufacturing and logistics sectors.
The Rubin GPUs represent Nvidia’s next-generation architecture, expected to become available in the second half of 2026. The chips reportedly offer a 4x reduction in the number of GPUs needed for certain workloads compared to previous generations.
