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"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, in the announcement.
The chip counts divide exactly into 382 Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, each housing 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs. Neither company disclosed the project's cost, but VR200 NVL72 systems are currently quoted at $5 million to $7 million apiece , which puts the rack hardware alone somewhere between $1.9 billion and $2.7 billion. Morgan Stanley estimates Nvidia will charge $55,000 per Rubin GPU in volume, pricing the GPU silicon at roughly $1.5 billion before memory, networking, and cooling.
No deployment timeline was given in the announcement, but Rubin racks are only expected to reach volume production in the second half of this year, and Nvidia said the facility will support trillion-parameter model training "as the AI factory expands," suggesting a phased ramp.
Noetra is a new consortium founded by SoftBank Corp., Sony , NEC, and Honda, with investment from 44 companies and organizations, NEC said in a press release also published today. Noetra and the national research institute AIST won a NEDO public tender on June 30 to run the FRONTia project from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2030, with ¥387.3 billion (roughly $2.4 billion) in first-year funding and up to ¥1 trillion (roughly $6.1 billion) over five years, Asia Times reported. Funding beyond the first two years is subject to annual stage-gate reviews, so the full amount isn't guaranteed.
Nvidia's memory costs soar 485%, latest AI systems now cost $7.8 million to build
Nvidia's Huang vows to deliver 'giant amounts' of Vera Rubin — company says that 'our roadmap is intact'
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Noetra's roadmap targets a reasoning foundation model in fiscal 2026, an omni-modal model that processes text, images, video, and audio by fiscal 2028, and "real-world native AI" capable of spatial awareness by fiscal 2030, per NEC.
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 due around 2030, but it's the first that's state-tendered national infrastructure rather than a corporate or scientific machine. Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, targets more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, an opportunity the government estimates at $133 billion.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-and-japans-noetra-consortium-to-build-140mw-rubin-ai-factory-with-27500-gpus#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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