Nvidia Signs Up Japan’s Robotics Establishment for Its Open World Models
Nvidia has recruited most of Japan’s industrial robotics establishment into the
Cosmos Coalition
, its open world-model program used to seed its physical AI stack. This announcement follows Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Tokyo.
The Companies Involved:
Twenty-two companies are set to join, including:
- AIRoA
- classmethod
- Enactic
- FANUC
- Fujitsu
- GROOVE X
- Hitachi
- Honda R&D
- Kawasaki Heavy Industries
- Kubota
- Mitsui & Co.
- Mitsubishi Corp.
- Mujin
- NEC
- Preferred Networks
- Sony Group
- Telexistence
- TIER IV
- TRON K.K.
- Turing
- Yaskawa Electric
These companies, as stated by Nvidia, "intend to join," though no formal commitments or financial details have been disclosed.
Nvidia’s Strategy:
This move echoes Nvidia’s previous partnerships with Hyundai around the Atlas humanoid and Tesla’s Optimus program, where they supply the stack while allowing industrial partners to own deployment.
Technical Aspects:
The technical highlight is Cosmos 3 Edge, a four-billion-parameter model built on Nvidia’s Nemotron family, optimized for edge devices rather than data centers. Nvidia claims developers can customize it for specific applications in about a day. It will be supported across RTX GPUs, DGX systems, and new Jetson T2000 and T3000 modules.
Fujitsu leads a concrete initiative exploring a collaborative control platform with FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki. This platform integrates digital and physical operations across industries, utilizing Cosmos world foundation models, Isaac robotics platform, Omniverse NuRec libraries, and Newton physics engine for digital twins, robot learning, and simulation-to-real validation.
Specific Applications:
Kubota aims to use Cosmos for autonomous agriculture, while Enactic is fine-tuning Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T model for elder-care semi-humanoid robots.
Shimizu Corporation employs Metropolis for construction site safety, GROOVE X builds Jetson-powered companion robots, and Kawasaki plans to leverage the technology across healthcare, shipbuilding, transportation, aerospace, and energy.
Jensen Huang remarked: "Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries." He further emphasized the significance of physical AI as a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity for Japan.
A second release on the same day delved into the language layer, with Institute of Science Tokyo developing open models Swallow on Nemotron datasets and SB Intuitions, SoftBank’s generative AI unit, contributing to the effort.