Nvidia has unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a compact 4-billion-parameter world model designed for on-device vision reasoning and robot control, alongside what it calls the world's first national AI infrastructure — a $2.4 billion supercomputing hub in Japan backed by the country's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The announcements, made during CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Japan this week, mark Nvidia's deepest push yet into physical AI — models that let machines perceive, reason about, and act in the real world.

Cosmos 3 Edge: Robotics in Your Pocket

Cosmos 3 Edge, built on Nvidia's Nemotron architecture, can generate robot policies and reason about visual scenes directly on edge devices without needing a cloud connection. Developers can adapt it to specific robots, vehicles, and sensors in about a day. It runs on Nvidia's Jetson platform — including the newly announced T2000 and T3000 modules — as well as RTX GPUs and DGX systems.

FRONTia: Japan's National AI Factory

The centerpiece of the Japan push is FRONTia, an AI factory to be built by Noetra Corp. powered by 27,500 Nvidia Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, drawing 140 megawatts of power. The facility will develop open multimodal foundation models for robotics, digital twins, and intelligent manufacturing.

"The next frontier of AI is in the physical world and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan," Huang said. "The country that invented modern manufacturing is now building the AI factories for the next industrial revolution."

An Industrial Coalition

More than 20 Japanese companies have joined Nvidia's Cosmos Coalition, including Toyota, Sony Group, SoftBank, Honda R&D, FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC. Toyota will use Nvidia hardware and software to power its Woven City smart city project. SoftBank is building a physical AI development platform on Cosmos, while Fujitsu is collaborating with FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki on a collaborative control platform for industrial robotics.

Japan aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, an opportunity Nvidia values at $133 billion. The initiative builds on Nvidia's growing sovereign AI business, in which governments fund domestic computing capacity rather than relying on foreign cloud providers.

Sources