Nvidia and Japan's Noetra consortium will build a 140 MW AI factory with 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, establishing the world's first national AI infrastructure consortium.

Nvidia announced today that it is partnering with Japan's Noetra Corp. to build a 140-megawatt AI factory housing 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs. This facility will serve as the compute foundation for FRONTia, Japan's government-funded physical AI program. The system will be built from 382 Vera Rubin NVL72 racks on Nvidia's DSX reference platform, connected via Spectrum-X Ethernet, and designed to train open multimodal foundation models for robotics, digital twins, and industrial automation. The pretrained weights will be shared broadly with domestic developers.

"Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

Each Vera Rubin NVL72 rack houses 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs. While neither company disclosed the total project cost, comparable VR200 NVL72 systems are currently quoted at $5 million to $7 million each, placing the rack hardware alone at an estimated $1.9 billion to $2.7 billion. Morgan Stanley estimates Nvidia charges $55,000 per Rubin GPU in volume, pricing GPU silicon at approximately $1.5 billion before accounting for memory, networking, and cooling infrastructure.

No specific deployment timeline was announced, though Rubin racks are expected to reach volume production in the second half of 2026. Nvidia indicated the facility will support trillion-parameter model training "as the AI factory expands," suggesting a phased rollout.

Noetra is a newly formed consortium founded by SoftBank Corp., Sony, NEC, and Honda, with backing from 44 companies and organizations. Noetra and the national research institute AIST won a NEDO public tender on June 30 to operate the FRONTia project from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2030. First-year funding totals ¥387.3 billion (approximately $2.4 billion), with budgets potentially reaching ¥1 trillion (roughly $6.1 billion) over five years. Funding beyond the first two years remains subject to annual stage-gate reviews.

Noetra's roadmap targets a reasoning foundation model by fiscal 2026, an omni-modal model processing text, images, video, and audio by fiscal 2028, and "real-world native AI" capable of spatial awareness by fiscal 2030. The AI factory follows SoftBank's Blackwell-based DGX supercomputer announced in 2024 and FugakuNEXT, the $740 million RIKEN, Fujitsu, and Nvidia zetta-scale system expected around 2030. However, this represents the first state-tendered national infrastructure project of its kind, distinct from prior corporate or scientific machines. Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets over 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, an opportunity the government estimates at $133 billion.