Japan builds world's first national AI factory with Nvidia, backed by $6 billion government investment

Japan just did something no other country has done: commit to building a national-scale AI factory from scratch, powered entirely by Nvidia’s latest silicon. The facility, announced on July 16, will pack 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs into roughly 382 NVL72 rack configurations, drawing 140 megawatts of data center capacity.

The project is backed by 1 trillion yen, approximately $6 billion, in Japanese government funding over five years.

Inside the factory and the consortium behind it

The entity building this thing is Noetra Corp., a company established in January 2026 by SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and NEC.

Noetra will operate the facility as part of Japan’s METI-backed FRONTia Project. The initiative’s goal is to develop open multimodal foundation models, the kind of AI systems that can process text, images, video, and sensor data simultaneously, and then share those pretrained models with domestic developers across manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare.