Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urged the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday to build out domestic artificial intelligence infrastructure that could fuel a robotics revolution, aligning with the government’s goal to boost public- and private-sector funding in AI and semiconductors.

Huang’s exchange with the LDP’s digital committee came a day after he met with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and lobbied him to generate more power to fuel AI.

“You must build it yourself because it’s your intelligence,” said Huang, who has run the U.S. semiconductor giant since 1993 and delivered the world’s first DGX-1 server to OpenAI in 2016.

Huang told former digital minister Takuya Hirai and other committee members that this is the ideal moment to pair Japan’s industrial strengths with the latest physical AI, turning labor‑intensive sectors into a robotics‑driven industry and delivering the greatest benefits to core science and manufacturing.

After Huang’s presentation, lawmakers wanted to know if and how Japan can compete with China on AI.

Responding to former digital minister Taro Kono’s question about how Japan can “stay ahead of China or any other dictatorship in this field,” Huang said lawmakers must learn how to regulate AI. He noted that China enjoys a major edge in both chipmaking and software but said that Japan does not need software to use AI to revolutionize its manufacturing sector.

“AI doesn’t need software,” said Huang. “There’s a new way to program the computer. It’s called ChatGPT. It’s called AI. You program the computer by telling the computer what you want.”

Japan has pledged to increase government and corporate funding in AI to over ¥50 trillion ($350 billion) in the next 10 years.

The government will invest ¥1.9 trillion from the fiscal 2024 supplementary budget and fiscal 2025 budget in domestic semiconductors and AI data centers, Ishiba said at a press conference on April 1.

The Lower House on Friday passed an AI bill that empowers the government to investigate companies misusing the technology and publish their names. While the measure is not legally binding, lawmakers added a clause that requests the government to crack down on deepfake pornography, including by ordering website administrators to delete illegal information and providing support for victims.

Japan’s use of AI is remarkably low compared to the U.S. and China, with only 9% of Japanese using AI services and 42% of companies adopting policies in 2024 to use them, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Huang told reporters on Tuesday that for Japan to see more widespread use of AI, it needs to create a Japanese AI that encodes the country’s history, knowledge, common sense and culture, and allow manufacturing industries to revolutionize with AI.

“This is your moment. And I feel so much energy around robotics here in Japan,” Huang told lawmakers.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/04/22/tech/nvidia-ldp/