Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days — July 15 and 16 — in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip-supply elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan,：https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/taiwan-ecosystem-ai-infrastructure/ and：https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/korea-ecosystem-2026/ months after a visit to South Korea：https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/nvidia-expands-ai-ties-with-hyundai-samsung-sk-naver/. He left with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI’s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.

Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment：https://x.com/YahooFinance/status/2077436987812778368?s=20 helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again — this time to build the physical-AI era, starting with these three projects:

Toyota — cars and physical AI. Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform：https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/japan-ecosystem-2026/?ncid=so-twit-754921&linkId=100000430923665#toyota at CES in January 2025：https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/07/3005072/0/en/Toyota-Aurora-and-Continental-Join-Growing-List-of-NVIDIA-Partners-Rolling-Out-Next-Generation-Highly-Automated-and-Autonomous-Vehicle-Fleets.html; the newer work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, into the software that runs its vehicles, and into systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will run advanced driver assistance, which steers and brakes but still requires a driver, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on a human driver.

Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to back it. Facing a shrinking workforce,：https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/05/japan-is-proving-experimental-physical-ai-is-ready-for-the-real-world/ Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots：https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260630_21/ across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment：https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence/japan-targets-65bn-in-public-private-physical-ai-investment-by-2040.

The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30%：https://seisanzai-japan.com/article/p6121/ of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a domestic foundation model to run the machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, into the trillions of parameters, would be trained.

Underneath the industrial case is a sovereign one. As the U.S. and China pull ahead in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own compute, and less dependence on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical-AI launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov1qHXbDltQ joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion：https://asia.nikkei.com/economy/japan-maps-2.3tn-investment-plan-across-17-strategic-sectors) in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra’s factory — which Nvidia bills as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure”：https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/japan-government-industrial-leaders-and-nvidia-launch-the-worlds-first-national-ai-infrastructure — is the clearest bet yet. Japan’s push for independence, at least for now, rests on American chips.

In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech — the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu, and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply-chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya.

It’s the same playbook he ran weeks earlier — a homecoming keynote in Taiwan, fried chicken：https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/31/world/video/nvidia-jensen-huang-samsung-hyundai-fried-chicken-seoul-digvid, and a 50,000-GPU deal in Seoul last fall.：https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/nvidia-expands-ai-ties-with-hyundai-samsung-sk-naver/ This time, it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain, and the chips underneath.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission：https://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards/. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital.

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