27,500 NVIDIA GPUs for a Single Data Center: Japan Prepares Its Weapon in the AI Era

NVIDIA has announced a collaboration with the Japanese consortium Noetra to create an AI Factory aimed at becoming the computing infrastructure for the government program FRONTia, a national initiative focused on the development of so-called Physical AI.

The facility will have a power capacity of 140 MW and will be built around NVIDIA's DSX data center platform. The infrastructure will employ 382 Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, each consisting of 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, for a total of 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera processors. The interconnection between systems will be managed by the Spectrum-X Ethernet network, while high-bandwidth communication within the racks will be ensured by NVLink.

According to NVIDIA, the platform will represent a comprehensive solution that integrates hardware, networking, systems, and software for the training and deployment of open multimodal models. Pre-trained model weights will be made available to Japanese developers and companies, who will be able to adapt them to their needs in robotics, logistics, and automation.

The infrastructure is designed to handle the training of models with trillions of parameters, gradually increasing computing capacity as the AI Factory expands. However, NVIDIA and Noetra have not communicated a precise timeline for the system's commissioning.

The investment size is particularly significant. Although the official cost has not been disclosed, market estimates indicate a price between 5 and 7 million dollars for each VR200 NVL72 system. Thus, the hardware alone for the racks could be worth between 1.9 and 2.7 billion dollars, to which memory, networking devices, cooling systems, and data center infrastructure should be added.

"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, presenting the initiative.

Noetra is a consortium recently formed with the participation of SoftBank, Sony, NEC, and Honda, supported by a total of 44 companies and organizations. Together with the national research institute AIST, the consortium has won the public tender issued by NEDO to manage the FRONTia program from 2026 to 2030.

The project’s technological roadmap includes a reasoning foundation model by fiscal year 2026, an omni-modal model capable of processing text, images, video, and audio by 2028, and by 2030, a platform defined as "real-world native AI," equipped with spatial awareness and designed to operate directly in the physical world through robots and autonomous systems.