Jensen Huang came to Tokyo bearing gifts: a slew of AI and robotics partnerships for Japan's tech industry, and red bean buns for the crowd.
On Wednesday, the Nvidia CEO visited a red-lantern izakaya, a traditional Japanese bar, in Tokyo's Kanda district, where a crowd gathered outside hoping to glimpse "kawa-jan" — "leather jacket" — as he's affectionately known in Japan.
The trip's centerpiece, announced Thursday, is a partnership with Noetra Corp, the state-backed AI developer formed by SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda, to build a 27,500-GPU "AI factory" billed as the world's first national AI infrastructure for robotics.
Huang also swung by a former Sega arcade in Akihabara to thank the gaming giant whose $5 million lifeline he said saved a struggling Nvidia in the 1990s, and visited the chipmaker's Build-a-Claw event.
However, it was the after-hours itinerary that stole the show. Huang was spotted having dinner at Yakiton Sankichi, a chain bar popular for after-work drinks, where Japanese outlet Diamond Online reported the CEO of the world's most valuable company tucked into offal hotpot and a "baka-mori" — roughly, "stupidly big" — mountain of fries.
米半導体大手、エヌビディア
ジェンスン・フアンCEO来日
「東京での1日」を追う！
東京・神田のやきとん三吉で取引先と懇談
フアン氏が食べたのはもつ鍋や山盛ポテトフライ
（写真はお店の許可をいただき撮影しました）
ダイヤモンド編集部が密着したシーンを順次お届けしていきます。… pic.twitter.com/6IN9fUYxyH
His tablemates: the top execs from Kioxia, Tokyo Electron, Shin-Etsu Chemical, Sumitomo Electric, Taiyo Yuden, and Ajinomoto, per Bloomberg.
When dinner finished, Huang emerged to the waiting crowd and pressed red bean buns, a popular Japanese snack, into outstretched hands.
For Huang, eating like a local has become a tradition on his business trips. In May, he was spotted eating fried bean sauce noodles on a Beijing sidewalk after accompanying President Donald Trump on his state visit to China. "It's so good," he told a crowd of onlookers.
Over the years, Huang has been photographed at street food spots in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and South Korea, where his fried chicken dinner with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai was crashed by photographers last year.
Wherever Nvidia announces its next AI factory, the local restaurants should probably start prepping now.
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Georgia is a fellow at Business Insider's London office.Before joining Business Insider, she worked at Japan's largest newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, and interned at the Financial Times. She is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham. You can contact her via email at [email protected]
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