Nikkei says NTT Data is in final talks on an Osaka data centre for Anthropic of up to 500 MW. Neither company has commented. Grid power will likely be slow, and a local site would not by itself keep data in Japan.
Yamaha releases VOCALOID7 on November 11, 2026, with an AI Megpoid based on Megumi Nakajima's voice. Vocaloid voices have come from real people. In an age of AI cloning, what is a voice with a known owner worth?
JERA, Dell and RHAELM plan a 400 MW AI data center at JERA's Chiba gas plant, powered without the public grid. Why there, what gas means, and the US case regulators blocked.
For nearly 25 years, only one double-Lambda hypernucleus had been fully identified. A RIKEN-led team used AI to sift 0.2% of J-PARC's photographic film, then pinned down a boron-13 nucleus by hand.
On September 11, 2026, 25 Fields Medalists signed a declaration on AI and mathematics. Headlines read it as a revolt against AI. The real target was AI companies using math problems as a benchmark.
Underwater, only sound carries far, so the ocean is still read by a handful of specialists. NEC has a Japanese defence contract to build a self-supervised underwater acoustic foundation model by fiscal 2027.
KDDI's Buffmee and SoftBank's GaranAI launched in July 2026 on the same premise: use only licensed material, meter how much gets used, and pay publishers back. One sells to readers, the other to AI developers.
Japan's amended privacy law, passed on July 10, 2026, waives consent for acquiring and sharing personal data when the purpose is AI training or statistics. Medical and criminal records sit inside the exception. The design runs on the same logic as Japan's copyright carve-out, and that is what sets it apart from the EU and South Korea.
Toyota, Shinshu University and 11 partners are building a self-driving lab where robots run experiments and AI picks what to try next. Here is how Japan's closed-loop materials push compares with Berkeley's A-Lab and China's robot chemist.
In 2004, a University of Tokyo brain scientist said humans are born wired for grammar. In 2022, ChatGPT learned language without any such wiring. The half-century debate Chomsky started is wide open again.
Sony AI's autonomous robot Ace beat elite table tennis players and made the cover of Nature. From its Gran Turismo Sophy roots to the fast-ball wall that stumped DeepMind and a 20.2-millisecond reaction loop, here's how Sony's robot reached elite-competitive level in a real, physical sport.