When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang toured East Asia this spring, he spent nearly two weeks in Taiwan calling it the "center of the AI revolution," then flew to South Korea to meet with Samsung and SK Hynix over high-bandwidth memory chips. Japan, sitting between the two, did not make the itinerary — a gap Japanese media have started calling "Japan passing."
The snub landed at an awkward moment for a country that once set the global standard in robotics. Now, as artificial intelligence reshapes the hardware powering everything from factory arms to humanoid machines, Tokyo is confronting how far its once-dominant position has slipped.
A Robotics Pioneer Cedes Ground To China
Japan built its reputation on precision. Companies such as Fanuc turned industrial arm robots into a specialty, prized for accuracy and reliability across the global auto and electronics industries. Honda's ASIMO, unveiled in 2000, became a symbol of Japanese robotics prowess, and for years Japan ranked among world leaders in robot density — the number of robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers.
That lead has narrowed sharply. According to the International Federation of Robotics and market researcher Omdia, China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 alone — the most of any country, and roughly nine times the U.S. total — bringing the number of robots operating in Chinese factories past two million. Japan's installations, by contrast, have been declining.
The shift is even more pronounced in humanoid and general-purpose robots, a category widely seen as AI's next hardware frontier. Chinese firms such as Unitree Robotics and AgiBot accounted for nearly 80% to 90% of global humanoid robot shipments in 2025, according to reporting by the New York Times, with units priced as low as a few thousand dollars — a cost structure made possible by piggybacking on China's electric-vehicle supply chains. At a recent humanoid robotics summit in Tokyo, the Times reported, Japanese executives spent less time celebrating past achievements and more time debating how to break into a market China now dominates.
Nvidia Chooses A Chinese Robotics Partner
That dominance received a further vote of confidence from Silicon Valley. Nvidia recently unveiled a partnership with Unitree Robotics to build a research-oriented humanoid robot platform, Isaac GR00T, using Unitree's H2 Plus model as its hardware base. Huang announced the tie-up at Nvidia's GTC event in Taipei, even as the company said it would also work with manufacturers in the United States, Europe and South Korea.
That Nvidia's first named partner was a Chinese company was hard for Japanese observers to ignore, underscoring how central China's scale and cost advantages have become to the next generation of AI-era hardware.
A Regional Tour That Notably Skipped Tokyo
Huang's own itinerary reinforced the point. During his visit to Taiwan in May and June, he held extended talks with suppliers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. In South Korea, his meetings centered on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, chips critical to AI systems. Japan received no equivalent visit.
Nikkei has attributed the omission to Japan's position in the AI supply chain: the country mainly supplies materials such as silicon wafers and specialty chemicals rather than advanced chips themselves. That leaves Japan in a supporting role, while Taiwan dominates advanced chip manufacturing and South Korea leads in AI memory — leaving Tokyo with a comparatively muted presence in an industry increasingly defined by direct chip production.
Tokyo Bets On A Global Talent Pipeline
Japan's government has moved to respond. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's cabinet plans to include a major talent-development initiative in its 2026 Comprehensive Innovation Strategy: sending 30,000 young researchers abroad for medium- to long-term stints between fiscal years 2026 and 2030, with priority given to 17 strategic technology fields including AI, quantum computing and semiconductors, according to Nikkei.
The goal, Nikkei reported, is to expose younger Japanese researchers to leading international institutions so they can build experience and strengthen the country's basic research and innovation capacity — an implicit acknowledgment that domestic resources alone are no longer enough to compete globally in AI.
A Deeper Reckoning Ahead For Japan
The anxiety runs deeper than any single snub or supply deal. China's electric-vehicle and drone industries have built low-cost, vertically integrated supply chains that now underpin much of the world's robotics and AI hardware production, leaving Japan's traditional strength in precision manufacturing looking increasingly narrow by comparison.
Japan's challenges extend to its innovation ecosystem as well: strong as its manufacturing base remains, the country has lagged in integrating AI software with hardware, iterating quickly and building the venture-capital networks that fuel new AI companies. That gap persists even as Japan's overall economy performs well on paper — GDP and stock markets have been strong — while many younger workers still describe a "rich country, poor people" reality of stagnant wage growth.
Sending a generation of researchers abroad will not by itself close the distance between Tokyo and the AI hardware leaders in Beijing, Taipei and Seoul. But it signals that Japan's government recognizes a contest that is no longer just about who builds the best individual robot — it is about who controls the supply chains, ecosystems and talent networks behind it. How well Japan adapts is likely to shape its standing in the region for the next decade. （Related： Taiwan's Powerchip Rides TSMC CoWoS Overflow Into AI Packaging ｜ Latest ）
