Japan Launches "Noetra" Domestic AI Project: NVIDIA Supplies 27,500 Rubin GPUs, with Participation from 44 Companies including Sony and SoftBank

BlockBeats News, July 17th - The Japanese domestic multimodal base model R&D project "Noetra" was officially launched on July 16th. The core companies involved are Sony Group, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda, with a total of 44 companies and organizations participating in the investment. These include a wide range of industries such as manufacturing, finance, logistics, and communications. Engineers from institutions such as the Industrial Technology Institute and Preferred Networks will also be involved in the R&D. This project is part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's promotion of the "Multimodal Base Model Development Business for AI Robots and Physical AI" (officially referred to by NVIDIA as the FRONTia Project). The goal is to create a Japanese domestic base model for physical AI scenarios such as manufacturing sites and robots, rather than just adding a Japanese language conversational AI.

On the hardware side, Noetra will collaborate with NVIDIA to build a computing platform equipped with approximately 27,500 of the latest Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs. It will use the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and DSX platform architecture, with a designed power capacity of 140 megawatts. The construction is scheduled to start in April 2027, with operation commencing in June 2028. At that time, it will become Japan's largest AI computing infrastructure.

The R&D roadmap will progress in three stages: starting from the fiscal year 2026 to develop a core reasoning base model focusing on AI agents and natural language processing; by the fiscal year 2028, achieving a full multimodal base model seamlessly integrating text, image, video, and audio; and by the fiscal year 2030, realizing a real-world native AI that understands spatial and physical attributes, ultimately applied in fields such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and communications.