Nvidia expands Toyota AI partnership for smart cities, factories
Complete. Here is the key summaryNvidia and Toyota are expanding their decade-long partnership to integrate AI into smart cities, traffic systems, and manufacturing. Nvidia will supply hardware and software for Toyota's Woven City prototype, digital twins of assembly lines via Omniverse, and automotive software development using Isaac robotics and Nemotron models. This collaboration extends beyond autonomous vehicles to physical AI in robotics and urban infrastructure.
NVIDIA will supply its artificial intelligence hardware and software to Toyota Motor to power smart cities, traffic intelligence systems and carmaking factories, broadening a decade-long partnership that began with developing autonomous vehicles.
The two companies will deepen their collaboration and work on bringing AI into the real world, Nvidia said in a statement on Thursday (Jul 16).
The pair had previously also teamed up with US-based Ready Robotics on software to help improve safety and productivity on factory floors.
“We are expanding our partnership to advance physical AI across not only automotive but also robotics and smart cities,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI.
Extending the reach of AI beyond the data centre and integrating it directly into devices and machines is an industry-wide focus this year.
Jensen Huang, the US company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, leads a visit to Japan this week to drum up more business and excitement around the potential of the new technology.
Earlier in the week, Huang’s longtime friend and fellow AI evangelist Masayoshi Son declared questions around over-investment in AI “foolish” and encouraged Japanese businesses to seize the opportunity ahead of them at his company’s SoftBank World event.
Toyota will integrate Nvidia’s AI platforms into Woven City, its experimental prototype community built on a former factory site in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. Woven City serves as a real-world laboratory for testing cutting-edge technologies in a live setting.
Beyond urban mobility, Toyota will deploy Nvidia’s Omniverse digital platform to build digital twins of its vehicle assembly lines, where it will be able to virtually model different production methods and optimise efficiency.
It will also leverage Nvidia’s Isaac robotics platform and Nemotron large language models to accelerate automotive software development.
The alliance began in 2017 when Toyota selected the Nvidia Drive PX platform to trial its early automated driving systems.
The two extended it last year when Toyota committed to using the Nvidia Drive AGX Orin platform for its upcoming commercial vehicle fleets. BLOOMBERG