Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said on June 30 it will provide ¥387.3 billion, about $2.383 billion, in FY2026 development contract funding to a new SoftBank-led company and other developers of domestic AI foundation models. One recipient is Noetra, established by SoftBank, NEC, Honda, and Sony Group, to build models with advanced Japanese-language understanding, reasoning, and multimodal recognition of images, video, audio, and physical space. Separately, Nikkei reported Japan plans support of up to ¥1 trillion, about $6.2 billion, for nine companies including SoftBank Group affiliates as part of a broader push to build a self-reliant domestic AI ecosystem spanning computing infrastructure, model training, and industrial applications, and to reduce reliance on overseas models and platforms.