NVIDIA Spearheads AI Revolution in Japan: Partnerships, Infrastructure, and Innovation

'Every Industry, Every Company, Every Country Must Produce a New Industrial Revolution,' Says NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at AI Summit Japan

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son discuss Japan's emerging role in AI. The next technology revolution is here, and Japan is poised to be a major part of it. At NVIDIA's AI Summit Japan on Wednesday, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son shared a sweeping vision for Japan's role in the AI revolution. Speaking in Tokyo, Huang underscored that AI infrastructure is essential to drive global transformation. In his talk, he emphasized two types of AI: digital and physical. Digital is represented by AI agents, while physical AI is represented by robotics. He said Japan is poised to create both types, leveraging its unique language, culture and data. "Every industry, every company, every country must produce a new industrial revolution," Huang said, pointing to AI as the catalyst for this shift. Huang emphasized Japan's unique position to lead in this AI-driven economy, praising the country's history of innovation and engineering excellence as well as its technological and cultural panache. "I can't imagine a better country to lead the robotics AI revolution than Japan," Huang said. "You have created some of the world's best robots. These are the robots we grew up with, the robots we've loved our whole lives." Huang highlighted the potential of agentic AI -- advanced digital agents capable of understanding, reasoning, planning, and taking action -- to transform productivity across industries. He noted that these agents can tackle complex, multi-step tasks, effectively doing "50% of the work for 100% of the people," turbocharging human productivity. By turning data into actionable insights, agentic AI offers companies powerful tools to enhance operations without replacing human roles. Among the summit's major announcements was NVIDIA's collaboration with SoftBank to build Japan's most powerful AI supercomputer. Using the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, SoftBank's DGX SuperPOD will deliver extensive computing power to drive sovereign AI initiatives, including large language models (LLMs) specifically designed for Japan. "With your support, we are creating the largest AI data center here in Japan," said Son, a visionary who, as Huang noted, has been a part of every major technology revolution of the past half-century. "We should provide this platform to many of those researchers, the students, the startups, so that we can encourage ... so that they have a better access [to] much more compute." Huang noted that the AI supercomputer project is just one part of the collaboration. SoftBank also successfully piloted the world's first combined AI and 5G network, known as AI-RAN (radio access network). The network enables AI and 5G workloads to run simultaneously, opening new revenue possibilities for telecom providers. "Now with this intelligence network that we densely connect each other, [it will] become one big neural brain for the infrastructure intelligence to Japan," Son said. "That will be amazing." Huang emphasized the profound synergy between AI and robotics, highlighting how advancements in artificial intelligence have created new possibilities for robotics across industries. He noted that as AI enables machines to learn, adapt and perform complex tasks autonomously, robotics is evolving beyond traditional programming. "I hope that Japan will take advantage of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and combine that with your world-class expertise in mechatronics," Huang said. "No country in the world has greater skills in mechatronics than Japan, and this is an extraordinary opportunity to seize." NVIDIA aims to develop a national AI infrastructure network through partnerships with Japanese cloud leaders such as GMO Internet Group and SAKURA internet. Supported by the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, this infrastructure will support sectors like healthcare, automotive and robotics by providing advanced AI resources to companies and research institutions across Japan. "This is the beginning of a new era... we can't miss this time," Huang added.

Japan Tech Leaders Supercharge Sovereign AI With NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Omniverse

Leading enterprises and universities across Japan are adopting NVIDIA NeMo, NIM microservices and NVIDIA Isaac to accelerate domestic AI innovation. From call centers to factories to hospitals, AI is sweeping Japan. Undergirding it all: the exceptional resources of the island nation's world-class universities and global technology leaders such as Fujitsu, The Institute of Science Tokyo, NEC and NTT. NVIDIA software -- NVIDIA AI Enterprise for building and deploying AI agents and NVIDIA Omniverse for bringing AI into the physical world -- is playing a crucial role in supporting Japan's transformation into a global hub for AI development. The bigger picture: Japan's journey to AI sovereignty is well underway to support the nation in building, developing and sharing AI innovations at home and across the world. Japanese AI Pioneers to Power Homegrown Innovation Putting Japan in a position to become a global AI leader begins with AI-driven language models. Japanese tech leaders are developing advanced AI models that can better interpret Japanese cultural and linguistic nuances. These models enable developers to build AI applications for industries requiring high-precision outcomes, such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing. As Japan's tech giants support AI adoption across the country, they're using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. Fujitsu's Takane model is specifically built for high-stakes sectors like finance and security. The model is designed to prioritize security and accuracy with Japanese data, which is crucial for sensitive fields. It excels in both domestic and international Japanese LLM benchmarks for natural Japanese expression and accuracy. The companies plan to use NVIDIA NeMo for additional fine-tuning, and Fujitsu has tapped NVIDIA to support making Takane available as an NVIDIA NIM to broaden accessibility for the developer community. NEC's cotomi model uses NeMo's parallel processing techniques for efficient model training. It's already integrated with NEC's solutions in finance, manufacturing, healthcare and local governments. NTT Group is moving forward with NTT Communications' launch of NTT's large language model "tsuzumi," which is accelerated with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM for AI agent customer experiences and use cases such as document summarization. Meanwhile, startups such as Kotoba Technologies, a Tokyo-based software developer, will unveil its Kotoba-Whisper model, built using NVIDIA NeMo for AI model building. The transcription application built on the Kotoba-Whisper model performed live transcription during this week's conversation between SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at NVIDIA AI Summit Japan. Kotoba Technologies reports that using NeMo's automatic speech recognition for data preprocessing delivers superior transcription performance. Kotoba-Whisper is already used in healthcare to create medical records from patient conversations, in customer call centers and for automatic meeting minutes creation across various industries. These models are used by developers and researchers, especially those focusing on Japanese language AI applications. Academic Contributions to Japan's Sovereign AI Vision Japanese universities, meanwhile, are powering the ongoing transformation with a wave of AI innovations. Nagoya University's Ruri-Large, built using NVIDIA's Nemotron-4 340B -- which is also available as a NIM microservice -- is a Japanese embedding model. It achieves high document retrieval performance with high-quality synthetic data generated by Nemotron-4 340B, and it enables the enhancement of language model capabilities through retrieval-augmented generation using external, authoritative knowledge bases. The National Institute of Informatics will introduce LLM.jp-3-13B-Instruct, a sovereign AI model developed from scratch. Supported by several Japanese government-backed programs, this model underscores the nation's commitment to self-sufficiency in AI. It's expected to be available as a NIM microservice soon. The Institute of Science Tokyo and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, better known as AIST, will present the Llama 3.1 Swallow model. Optimized for Japanese tasks, it's now a NIM microservice that can integrate into generative AI workflows for uses ranging from cultural research to business applications. The University of Tokyo's Human Genome Center uses NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Parabricks software for rapid genomic analysis, advancing life sciences and precision medicine. Japan's Tech Providers Helping Organizations Adopt AI In addition, technology providers are working to bring NVIDIA AI technologies of all kinds to organizations across Japan. Accenture will deploy AI agent solutions based on the Accenture AI Refinery across all industries in Japan, customizing with NVIDIA NeMo and deploying with NVIDIA NIM for a Japanese-specific solution. Dell Technologies is deploying the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA globally -- with a key focus on the Japanese market -- and will support NVIDIA NIM microservices for Japanese enterprises across various industries. Deloitte will integrate NIM microservices that support the leading Japanese language models including LLM.jp, Kotoba, Ruri-large, Swallow and more, into its multi-agent solution. HPE has launched HPE Private Cloud AI platform, supporting NVIDIA AI Enterprise in a private environment. This solution can be tailored for organizations looking to tap into Japan's sovereign AI NIM microservices, meeting the needs of companies that prioritize data sovereignty while using advanced AI capabilities. Bringing Physical AI to Industries With NVIDIA Omniverse The proliferation of language models across academia, startups and enterprises, however, is just the start of Japan's AI revolution. A leading maker of industrial robots, a top automaker and a retail giant are all embracing NVIDIA Omniverse and AI, as physics-based simulation drives the next wave of automation. Industrial automation provider Yaskawa, which has shipped 600,000 robots, is developing adaptive robots for increased autonomy. Yaskawa is now adopting NVIDIA Isaac libraries and AI models to create adaptive robot applications for factory automation and other industries such as food, logistics, medical, agriculture and more. It's using NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator, a reference workflow of NVIDIA-accelerated libraries and AI models, to help its developers build AI-enabled manipulators, or robot arms. It's also using NVIDIA FoundationPose for precise 6D pose estimation and tracking. More broadly, NVIDIA and Yaskawa teams use AI-powered simulations and digital twin technology -- powered by Omniverse -- to accelerate the development and deployment of Yaskawa's robotic solutions, saving time and resources. Meanwhile, Toyota is looking into how to build robotic factory lines in Omniverse to improve tasks in robot motion in metal-forging processes. And another iconic Japanese company, Seven & i Holdings, is using Omniverse to gather insights from video cameras in research to optimize retail and enhance safety.

Japan's Startups Drive AI Innovation With NVIDIA Accelerated Computing

Tokyo's AI ecosystem shines at NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, highlighted by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at a fireside chat with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son. Lifelike digital humans engage with audiences in real time. Autonomous systems streamline complex logistics. And AI-driven language tools break down communication barriers on the fly. This isn't sci-fi. This is Tokyo's startup scene. Supercharged by AI -- and world-class academic and industrial might -- the region has become a global innovation hub. And the NVIDIA Inception program is right in the middle of it. With over 370 AI-driven startups in the program and a 250,000-person strong NVIDIA developer community, Japan's AI startup ecosystem is as bold as it is fast-moving. This week's NVIDIA AI Summit Japan puts these achievements in the spotlight, capturing the region's relentless innovation momentum. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son opened the summit with a fireside chat to discuss AI's transformative role, with Jensen diving into Japan's growing AI ecosystem and its push toward sovereign AI. Sessions followed with leaders from METI (Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), the University of Tokyo and other key players. Their success is no accident. Tokyo's academic powerhouses, global technology and industrial giants, and technology-savvy population of 14 million, provide the underpinnings of a global AI hub that stretches from the bustling startup scene in Shibuya to new hotbeds of tech development in Chiyoda and beyond. Supercharging Japan's Creative Class Iconic works from anime to manga have not only redefined entertainment in Japan -- they've etched themselves into global culture, inspiring fans across continents, languages and generations. Now, Japan's vibrant visual pop culture is spilling into AI, finding fresh ways to surprise and connect with audiences. Take startup AiHUB's digital celebrity Sali. Sali isn't just a character in the traditional sense. She's a digital being with presence -- responsive and lifelike. She blinks, she smiles, she reacts. Here, AI is doing something quietly revolutionary, slipping under the radar to redefine how people interact with media. At AI Summit Japan, AiHUB revealed that it will adopt the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE, in the lip-sync module of its digital human framework, providing Sali nuanced expressions and human-like emotional depth. ACE doesn't just make Sali relatable -- it puts her in a league of characters who transcend screens and pages. This integration reduced development and future management costs by approximately 50% while improving the expressiveness of the avatars, according to AiHUB. SDK Adoption: From Hesitation to High Velocity In the global tech race, success doesn't always hinge on the heroes you'd expect. The unsung stars here are software development kits -- those bundles of tools, libraries and documentation that cut the guesswork out of innovation. And in Japan's fast-evolving AI ecosystem, these once-overlooked SDKs are driving an improbable revolution. For years, Japan's tech companies treated SDKs with caution. Now, however, with AI advancing at lightspeed and NVIDIA GPUs powering the engine, SDKs have moved from a quiet corner to center stage. Take NVIDIA NeMo, a platform for building large language models, or LLMs. It's swiftly becoming the background for Japan's latest wave of real-time, AI-driven communication technologies. One company at the forefront is Kotoba Technologies, which has cracked the code on real-time speech recognition thanks to NeMo's powerful tools. Under a key Japanese government grant, Kotoba's language tools don't just capture sound -- they translate it live. It's a blend of computational heft and human ingenuity, redefining how multilingual communication happens in non-English-speaking countries like Japan. Kotoba's tools are used in customer call centers and for automatic meeting minutes creation across various industries. It was also used to perform live transcription during the AI Summit Japan fireside chat between Huang and Son. And if LLMs are the engines driving Japan's AI, then companies like APTO supply the fuel. Using NVIDIA NeMo Curator, APTO is changing the game in data annotation, handling the intensive prep work that makes LLMs effective. By refining data quality for big clients like RIKEN, Ricoh and ORIX, APTO has mastered the fine art of sifting valuable signals from noise. Through tools like WordCountFilter -- an ingenious mechanism that prunes short or unnatural sentences -- it's supercharging performance. APTO's data quality control boosted model accuracy scores and slashed training time. Across Japan, developers are looking to move on AI fast, and they're embracing SDKs to go further, faster. The Power of Cross-Sector Synergy The gears of Japan's AI ecosystem increasingly turn in sync thanks to NVIDIA-powered infrastructure that enables startups to build on each other's breakthroughs. As Japan's population ages, solutions like these address security needs as well as an intensifying labor shortage. Here, ugo and Asilla have taken on the challenge, using autonomous security systems to manage facilities across the country. Asilla's cutting-edge anomaly detection was developed with security in mind but is now finding applications in healthcare and retail. Built on the NVIDIA DeepStream and Triton Inference Server SDKs, Asilla's tech doesn't just identify risks -- it responds to them. In high-stakes environments, ugo and Asilla's systems, powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform, are already in action, identifying potential security threats and triggering real-time responses. NVIDIA's infrastructure is also at the heart of Kotoba Technologies' language tools, as well as AiHUB's lifelike digital avatars. Running on an AI backbone, these various tools seamlessly bridge media, communication and human interaction. The Story Behind the Story: Tokyo IPC and Osaka Innovation Hub All of these startups are part of a larger ecosystem that's accelerating Japan's rise as an AI powerhouse. Leading the charge is UTokyo IPC, the wholly owned venture capital arm of the University of Tokyo, operating through its flagship accelerator program, 1stRound. Cohosted by 18 universities and four national research institutions, this program serves as the nexus where academia and industry converge, providing hands-on guidance, resources and strategic support. By championing the real-world deployment of seed-stage deep-tech innovations, UTokyo IPC is igniting Japan's academic innovation landscape and setting the standard for others to follow. Meanwhile, Osaka's own Innovation Hub, OIH, expands this momentum beyond Tokyo, providing startups with coworking spaces and networking events. Its Startup Acceleration Program brings early-stage projects to market faster. Fast-moving hubs like these are core to Japan's AI ecosystem, giving startups the mentorship, funding and resources they need to go from prototype to fully commercialized product. And through NVIDIA's accelerated computing technologies and the Inception program, Japan's fast-moving startups are united with AI innovators across the globe.

NVIDIA and Global Consulting Leaders Speed AI Adoption Across Japan's Industries

Enterprises speed AI transformation with wave of innovation centers and services built on NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Omniverse industrial AI. Consulting giants including Accenture, Deloitte, EY Strategy and Consulting Co., Ltd. (or EY Japan), FPT, Kyndryl and Tata Consultancy Services Japan (TCS Japan) are working with NVIDIA to establish innovation centers in Japan to accelerate the nation's goal of embracing enterprise AI and physical AI across its industrial landscape. The centers will use NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, local language models and NVIDIA NIM microservices to help clients in Japan advance the development and deployment of AI agents tailored to their industries' respective needs, boosting productivity with a digital workforce. Using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, Japanese firms can develop digital twins and simulate complex physical AI systems, driving innovation in manufacturing, robotics and other sectors. Like many nations, Japan is navigating complex social and demographic challenges, which is leading to a smaller workforce as older generations retire. Leaning into its manufacturing and robotics leadership, the country is seeking opportunities to solve these challenges using AI. The Japanese government in April published a paper on its aims to become "the world's most AI-friendly country." AI adoption is strong and growing, as IDC reports that the Japanese AI systems market reached approximately $5.9 billion this year, with a year-on-year growth rate of 31.2%.1 The consulting giants' initiatives and activities include: Located in the Tokyo and Kansai metropolitan areas, these new consulting centers offer hands-on experience with NVIDIA's latest technologies and expert guidance -- helping accelerate AI transformation, solve complex social challenges and support the nation's economic growth. To learn more, watch the NVIDIA AI Summit Japan fireside chat with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Japan's Market Innovators Bring Physical AI to Industries With NVIDIA AI and Omniverse

Toyota, Yaskawa, Seven & i Holdings, and Rikei introduce digital twins and industrial AI to deliver the next wave of digitalization Robots transporting heavy metal at a Toyota plant. Yaskawa's robots working alongside human coworkers in factories. To advance efforts like these virtually, Rikei Corporation develops digital twin tooling to assist planning. And if that weren't enough, diversified retail holdings company Seven & i Holdings is running digital twin simulations to enhance customer experiences. Physical AI and industrial AI, powered by NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac and Metropolis, are propelling Japan's industrial giants into the future. Such pioneering moves in robotic manipulation, industrial inspection and digital twins for human assistance are on full display at NVIDIA AI Summit Japan this week. The arrival of generative AI-driven robotics leaps couldn't come at a better time. With its population in decline, Japan has a critical need for advanced robotics. A report in the Japan Times said the nation is expected to face an 11 million shortage of workers by 2040. Industrial and physical AI-based systems are today becoming accelerated by a three computer solution that enables robot AI model training, testing, and simulation and deployment. Looking Into the Future With Toyota Robotics Toyota is tapping into NVIDIA Omniverse for physics simulation for robot motion and gripping to improve its metal forging capabilities. That's helping to reduce the time it takes to teach robots to transport forging materials. Toyota is verifying to reproduce its robotic work handling and robot motion with the accuracy of NVIDIA PhysX with Omniverse. Omniverse enables modeling digital twins of factories and other environments that accurately duplicate the physical characteristics of objects and systems in the real world, which is foundational to building physical AI for driving next-generation autonomous systems. Omniverse enables Toyota to model things like mass properties, gravity and friction for comparing results with physical representations of tests. This can help work in manipulation and robot motion. It also allows Toyota to replicate the expertise of its senior employees with robotics for issues requiring a high degree of skills. And it increases safety and throughput since factory personnel are not required to work in the high temperatures and harsh environments associated with metal-forging production lines. Driving Automation, Yaskawa Harnesses NVIDIA Isaac Yaskawa is a leading global robotics manufacturer that has shipped more than 600,000 robots and offers nearly 200 robot models, including industrial robots for the automotive industry, collaborative robots and dual-arm robots. The Japanese robotics leader is expanding into new markets with its MOTOMAN NEXT adaptive robot, which is moving into task adaptation, versatility and flexibility. Driven by advanced robotics enabled by the NVIDIA Isaac and Omniverse platforms, Yaskawa's adaptive robots are focused on delivering automation for the food, logistics, medical and agriculture industries. Using NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator, a reference workflow of NVIDIA-accelerated libraries and AI models, Yaskawa is integrating AI to its industrial arm robots, giving them the ability to complete a wide range of industrial automation tasks. Yaskawa is using FoundationPose for precise 6D pose estimation and tracking. These AI models enhance the adaptability and efficiency of Yaskawa's robotic arms, and the motion control enables sim-to-real transition, making them versatile and effective at performing complex tasks across a wide range of industries. Additionally, Yaskawa is embracing digital twin and robotics simulations powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim, built on Omniverse, to accelerate the development and deployment of Yaskawa's robotic solutions, saving time and resources. Creating Customer Experiences at Seven & i Holdings With Omniverse, Metropolis Seven & i Holdings is one of the largest Japanese diversified retail holdings companies. The Japanese retail company runs a proof of concept to understand customer behaviors at its retail outlets with digital simulation. Seven & i Holdings is pushing its research activities by tapping into NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Metropolis to better understand operations across its retail stores. Using NVIDIA Metropolis, a set of developer tools for building vision AI applications, store operations are analyzed with computer vision models, helping improve efficiency and safety. A digital twin of this environment is developed in an Omniverse-based application, along with assets from Blender and animations from SideFX Houdini. Combining digital twins with price recognition, object tracking and other AI-based computation enables it to generate useful behavioral insights about retail environments and customer interactions. Such information offers opportunities to dynamically generate and show personalized ads on digital signage displays targeted to customers. The retailer plans to use Metropolis and the NVIDIA Merlin recommendation engine framework to create tailored suggestions to individual shoppers, responding to customer interests -- based on data -- like never before. Virtually Revolutionizing, Rikei Corporation Launches Asset Library for Digital Twins Rikei Corporation, a systems solutions provider, specializes in spatial computing and extended reality technology for the manufacturing sector. The technology company has developed JAPAN USD Factory, which is a digital twin asset library specifically for the Japanese manufacturing industry. Developed on NVIDIA Omniverse, JAPAN USD Factory reproduces materials and equipment commonly used in manufacturing sites across Japan in a digital form so that Japanese manufacturers can more easily build digital twins of their factories and warehouses. Rikei Corporation aims to streamline various stages of design, simulation and operations for the manufacturing process with these digital assets to enhance productivity with digital twins. Developed with OpenUSD, a universal 3D asset interchange, JAPAN USD Factory allows developers to access its asset libraries for things like palettes and racks, offering seamless integration across tools and workflows.