Nvidia $NVDA announced on Thursday that a broad group of Japanese industrial and technology companies intend to join its Cosmos Coalition, a collective aimed at building open physical AI models, as chief executive Jensen Huang visited Tokyo.
Fujitsu is leading a push to develop a collaborative control platform with FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries that would integrate Nvidia's physical AI technology to connect digital and physical industrial operations, the company said. The platform is intended to support AI model development, digital twins, robot simulation, and pre-deployment validation. Other coalition members include Hitachi, NEC, SoftBank Corp., Sony $SONY Group Corporation, Kubota, and AIRoA, among others.
According to the Associated Press, Huang appeared at the Tokyo announcement with Fujitsu chief executive Takahito Tokita and the heads of FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The executives cited Japan's labor shortage as a driving motivation, noting that the first phase of the collaboration is expected to arrive this year; they did not commit to a joint venture or offer a timetable for broader deployment.
Alongside the coalition news, Nvidia introduced Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4-billion-parameter model built to operate on Nvidia's Jetson edge computing hardware. The model is built to help robots and vision AI systems perceive their surroundings and generate actions locally, without relying on cloud infrastructure, the company said. Nvidia said the model can be adapted for specific robots or environments in about a day.
Nvidia also announced new Metropolis libraries intended to help developers build vision AI systems using Cosmos at least six times faster.
Several coalition members are already working with Nvidia's technology stack. SoftBank Corp. is building a physical AI development platform using Cosmos, Omniverse, and Isaac Sim, while also pursuing AI radio access network initiatives. Kawasaki Heavy Industries is applying Nvidia physical AI tools across healthcare, shipbuilding, aerospace, transportation, and energy. Kubota is exploring Cosmos-based tools for autonomous agriculture, and Enactic is fine-tuning Nvidia's Isaac GR00T model for elder-care robots.
"Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries," Huang said in a statement.
According to the Associated Press, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government has announced a goal of mobilizing more than 370 trillion yen — about $2.3 trillion — in combined public and private investment by 2040, spanning fields such as physical AI, semiconductors, and data centers.