SANTA CLARA — NVIDIA has revealed a major shift in Japan’s AI landscape, with leading enterprises and academic institutions adopting the company’s advanced technologies to accelerate AI innovation across industries like robotics, automotive, healthcare, and telecom. Japanese cloud providers such as SoftBank Corp., GMO Internet Group, Highreso, KDDI, Rutilea, and SAKURA Internet are incorporating NVIDIA’s accelerated computing, networking, and software platforms to drive this transformation.

Supported by a program from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), these cloud providers are deploying AI data centers across the country, providing critical computing resources to power AI development. According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, “Japan is on the cusp of an industrial revolution driven by AI, and with the collaboration of Japan’s tech giants, we are helping the country build the AI infrastructure that will redefine industries globally.”

AI Language Models Powering Japan’s Innovation
Japan’s tech leaders are at the forefront of developing advanced AI-driven language models designed to address the country’s unique linguistic and cultural needs. These models are facilitating AI applications in industries that require precise outcomes, such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.

Fujitsu’s Takane model is an example of this AI-driven innovation, tailored to secure and process Japanese data with exceptional accuracy. The model is optimized for critical sectors like finance and security and is performing well in both domestic and global Japanese language model benchmarks. Fujitsu plans to leverage NVIDIA NeMo for fine-tuning and making Takane available as an NVIDIA NIM (NeMo Inference Microservice), making it more accessible to developers.

NEC’s cotomi model benefits from NeMo’s parallel processing techniques, enabling efficient AI model training for sectors like finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and government services. Meanwhile, NTT Group is accelerating its AI capabilities through the launch of its large language model “tsuzumi,” which uses NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM to optimize AI agent experiences and tasks such as document summarization.

Startups and Academic Institutions Fueling AI Growth
Japanese startups like Kotoba Technologies are also leveraging NVIDIA NeMo to develop sophisticated AI models. Kotoba’s Kotoba-Whisper model, which focuses on automatic speech recognition (ASR), is being used for live transcription services in industries such as healthcare, call centers, and meeting automation. The model recently demonstrated its capabilities during a live conversation between SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the NVIDIA AI Summit Japan.

Japanese universities are playing a key role in advancing AI research, with institutions like Nagoya University and the National Institute of Informatics contributing to the development of sovereign AI models. Nagoya University’s Ruri-Large, built using NVIDIA’s Nemotron-4 340B, enhances document retrieval performance, while the National Institute of Informatics is working on LLM.jp-3-13B-Instruct, a sovereign AI model developed with support from Japanese government initiatives.

The Institute of Science Tokyo and AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) are contributing to generative AI with the Llama 3.1 Swallow model, a NIM microservice designed to support cultural research and business applications.

AI Adoption Across Industries
Across Japan, major technology providers are helping organizations implement NVIDIA’s AI technologies. Accenture is deploying AI agents based on the Accenture AI Refinery with NVIDIA NeMo to tailor solutions for Japanese businesses, while Dell Technologies focuses on expanding NVIDIA’s AI Factory and NIM microservices across Japan.

Deloitte and HPE are also playing pivotal roles by integrating NIM microservices into their solutions for AI model development. HPE’s Private Cloud AI platform is particularly focused on serving organizations that prioritize data sovereignty while utilizing cutting-edge AI capabilities.

AI in Industrial Automation
The adoption of NVIDIA’s AI solutions extends to industrial automation, with companies like Yaskawa, Toyota, and Seven & i Holdings leading the charge in applying AI and simulation technologies to their operations. Yaskawa is using NVIDIA Isaac libraries and AI models to develop adaptive robots for industries such as food, logistics, medical, and agriculture, accelerating automation processes in factories.

Toyota is exploring how to utilize NVIDIA Omniverse to optimize robotic factory lines for tasks like robot motion in metal-forging processes, while Seven & i Holdings is using Omniverse to gather data from video cameras to improve retail operations and enhance safety measures.

To learn more, check out NVIDIA’s blog on these use cases.

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