On July 17, Japan's domestic multimodal foundational model research project 'Noetra' was officially launched on July 16. The core companies involved are Sony Group, SoftBank, NEC, and Honda, with a total of 44 companies and organizations contributing funding. The project spans a wide range of industries including manufacturing, finance, logistics, and telecommunications, with engineers from institutions such as the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Preferred Networks also joining the research and development efforts. This project is part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's initiative to develop multimodal foundational models for AI robots and physical AI (officially referred to by Nvidia as the FRONTia Project), aimed at creating a domestic foundational model for physical AI scenarios such as manufacturing sites and robots, rather than merely adding a Japanese conversational AI. On the hardware front, Noetra will collaborate with Nvidia to build a computing platform equipped with approximately 27,500 of the latest Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, utilizing the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and DSX platform architecture, designed for a power capacity of 140 megawatts. Construction is planned to commence in April 2027 and production is expected to begin in June 2028, at which point it will become Japan's largest AI computing infrastructure. The R&D roadmap is divided into three phases: starting in 2026, the development of foundational models centered on AI agents and natural language processing; by 2028, achieving a fully multimodal foundational model that seamlessly integrates text, images, video, and audio; and by 2030, realizing a native AI that understands spatial and physical properties of the real world, ultimately applicable in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and telecommunications.