METI will provide ¥387.3 billion (approx 16.2 billion yuan) as 2026 fiscal-year
development commission fees to a new SoftBank-led company, Noetra, to develop a
domestic AI foundation model. The support targets physical-AI R&D that combines
robotics and AI to strengthen Japan’s manufacturing competitiveness. Noetra,
formed around SoftBank, NEC, Honda and Sony, will focus on high-level
Japanese-language understanding and reasoning and on multimodal foundation
models that recognize images, video, audio and physical space. The project has
been selected for support by NEDO.