SoftBank Corp. press release, July 16, 2026: Noetra Corp., with core members/investors Sony Group, SoftBank Corp., NEC, and Honda, launched full-scale R&D for a Japan-developed multimodal foundation model for AI-enabled robots and physical AI.
Consortium:
- Investments from 44 companies/organizations spanning manufacturing and AI adoption.
- R&D org centered on engineers seconded from core members, AIST, Preferred Networks, and others.
Compute:
- Will use Japan-based AI computing providers initially.
- With NVIDIA, plans infrastructure of approximately 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs for agentic/large-scale foundation-model workloads.
- Construction scheduled to begin April 2027; operations expected June 2028.
- Related NVIDIA/Nikkei reporting: 13,750 Vera CPUs, 382 NVL72 racks, ~140 MW; METI FRONTia Project with ~¥387.3B through March 2027 within ~¥1T ($6B) five-year package.
Model roadmap (Noetra):
- From FY2026 (year ending March 31, 2027): reasoning foundation model — advanced Japanese understanding, logical reasoning, instruction following for AI agents/NLP.
- By FY2028: omni-modal foundation model (text, images, video, audio).
- Toward FY2030: “Real-world Native AI” with spatial awareness for physical environments.
- Models to be made available externally and released in stages.
Quotes from CEOs of Noetra (Hironobu Tamba), Sony (Hiroki Totoki), SoftBank (Junichi Miyakawa), NEC (Takayuki Morita), Honda (Toshihiro Mibe) emphasize sovereign physical AI, industrial data staying in Japan, and economic security.
Participating companies include FANUC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Kawasaki, Sakana AI, Tokyo Electron, Yaskawa, major banks/insurers, and others (full alphabetical list in SoftBank PR).
Source: SoftBank Corp. official press release.