NVIDIA said on July 15 that more than 20 of Japan’s largest robotics, manufacturing and technology companies are building on its Cosmos physical AI platform, marking one of the broadest national commitments yet to the company’s push into machines that perceive and act in the real world rather than generate text or images.
What NVIDIA announced
The announcement centers on Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4-billion-parameter world model built on NVIDIA’s Nemotron family that lets robots and vision-AI agents interpret their surroundings and generate actions directly on edge hardware, according to NVIDIA. The company said developers can adapt the model to a specific robot or sensor setup in about a day using its open Cosmos framework, and that it runs on NVIDIA RTX GPUs, DGX systems and Jetson edge computers, including newly unveiled Jetson T2000 and T3000 modules.
Companies NVIDIA said intend to join its Cosmos Coalition in Japan include FANUC, Sony, SoftBank, Honda R&D, Hitachi, NEC, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Kubota, Mitsubishi Corp. and Yaskawa Electric, among more than a dozen others.
How companies plan to use it
Fujitsu is leading a collaborative control platform with FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries meant to run industrial operations on the Cosmos stack, NVIDIA said. SoftBank is building its own physical-AI development platform on top of Cosmos, Omniverse and Isaac Sim, while Kawasaki plans to apply the technology across shipbuilding, transportation, aerospace and healthcare. Kubota is exploring the platform for autonomous farm equipment, and NEC, Hitachi and Preferred Networks are pursuing related world-model and industrial-AI research, according to the company.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said “the next frontier of AI is in the physical world,” framing the initiative as a chance for Japan to modernize manufacturing around AI-driven machines.
Why it matters
The deal extends NVIDIA’s Cosmos Coalition deeper into one of the world’s largest industrial robotics markets. Japan’s manufacturers have long dominated industrial robotics hardware; pairing that base with NVIDIA’s AI software stack could speed the deployment of autonomous machines in factories, warehouses, farms and logistics networks. NVIDIA did not disclose financial terms or firm deployment timelines for most of the partners named.