Japan committed roughly ¥1.23 trillion ($7.9B) in METI's FY2026 chips-and-AI budget — a near-fourfold jump on FY2025 — alongside a ¥1 trillion ($6.4B) five-year private-sector vehicle led by SoftBank Group and 10 firms with engineers seconded from SoftBank and Preferred Networks. That positions Japan as the largest sovereign AI commitment outside the US and China. NeuronFeed tracks 5 Japanese AI companies, almost all Tokyo-headquartered, with disclosed VC rounds rare because most capital flows through corporate balance sheets. Sakana AI closed a ¥20B ($135M) Series B in November 2025 at a ¥400B (~$2.65B) post-money — a record for an unlisted Japanese startup — backed by NVIDIA, Khosla Ventures, MUFG, NEA, Lux Capital, and In-Q-Tel, with METI providing free GPU access during early growth. Preferred Networks runs the full stack across MN-Core silicon, compute, and foundation models; KDDI subsidiary ELYZA fine-tunes Japanese LLMs; AI Rinna spun out of Microsoft Japan; PKSHA Technology trades on the TSE. Within the ¥3.07T overall METI budget, ¥387.3B targets domestic foundation models, data centers, and physical AI for robotics. The 2025 AI Promotion Act stays lighter than the EU AI Act — Toyota, NTT, KDDI, and Mizuho procurement is meant to set deployment pace through 2026.