BlockBeats News, July 17th. On July 16th, Japan's domestically produced multimodal foundational model development project, "Noetra," was officially launched. The core companies involved are Sony Group, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda, with a total of 44 companies and organizations participating, covering a wide range of industries including manufacturing, finance, logistics, and telecommunications. Engineers from institutions such as the Industrial Technology Institute and Preferred Networks will also join the development team. This project is part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's promotion of the "Multimodal Foundational Model Development Business for AI Robots and Physical AI" (officially referred to by NVIDIA as the FRONTia Project), aiming to create a Japan-made foundational model for physical AI scenarios such as manufacturing sites and robots, rather than just adding another Japanese language conversational AI.

On the hardware side, Noetra will collaborate with NVIDIA to build a computing platform equipped with approximately 27,500 latest Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, using the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and DSX platform architecture, with a designed power capacity of 140 megawatts. The project is scheduled to start construction in April 2027 and be operational in June 2028, becoming Japan's largest AI computing infrastructure.

The development roadmap will proceed in three phases: starting from the 2026 fiscal year, the development will focus on the foundational model for reasoning core to AI agents and natural language processing. By the 2028 fiscal year, it aims to achieve a fully multimodal foundational model seamlessly integrating text, images, videos, and audio. By the 2030 fiscal year, the goal is to realize a real-world native AI that understands spatial and physical attributes, ultimately applying it in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and telecommunications.