Noetra Corp., a consortium-backed company including Sony, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda, leads Japan’s multimodal foundation model development for AI robots and physical AI, with AIST and NEDO support.

Daisuke Okanohara lays out a phased roadmap starting in fiscal year 2026 with a reasoning foundation model, advancing to an omni-modal model by FY2028, and Real-world Native AI capabilities by FY2030.

The July 16, 2026 event highlighted public-private collaboration to speed the deployment of physical AI in real-world industrial settings, leveraging Japan’s manufacturing, robotics, and data strengths.

METI and NEDO will oversee progress through a governance framework while AIST leads advanced tech research in collaboration with global institutions.

Noetra plans to deploy about 27,500 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs starting in April 2027 to support agentic AI workloads, with operations beginning in June 2028, funded in collaboration with NVIDIA.

AIST’s Masahiro Hamasaki stresses cross-disciplinary collaboration with researchers in the UK, France, Germany, Canada, the US, and Japan to advance state-of-the-art AI research and Noetra’s model development.

Noetra’s CEO Hironobu Tamba describes a core AI that acts as a teacher for other AI systems, built on frontline industry expertise to create a continuous improvement loop.

The foundation models will be released in stages for external use, providing Japan with an autonomous alternative to overseas AI models with emphasis on safety and reliability.

Japan’s push for physical AI is led by METI through the FRONTia Project to build trustworthy AI grounded in real-world data.

Noetra and AIST were selected for NEDO’s Multimodal Foundation Model Development Project for AI Robots and Physical AI, backed by investments from 44 organizations across industries.