NVIDIA and Toyota Motor are broadening a decade-old partnership beyond self-driving cars, agreeing to co-develop AI hardware and software for Toyota's factories, smart cities and Woven City prototype town under a July 15 expansion announced by both companies.
From Drive PX to Omniverse across every plant floor
The pair first teamed up in 2017 when Toyota picked NVIDIA's Drive PX platform to trial early automated-driving systems. The new phase pushes NVIDIA's Omniverse into Toyota's vehicle-assembly lines to build factory digital twins that virtually model production methods and optimize efficiency. Toyota will also deploy NVIDIA's Isaac robotics platform and Nemotron large language models to accelerate automotive software development. Bloomberg first reported the terms of the deal.
Woven City becomes NVIDIA's physical-AI showcase
At the Woven City prototype town under construction in Susono City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Toyota and NVIDIA will jointly develop AI-driven urban mobility and traffic-intelligence systems built on NVIDIA's platform. The city functions as a testbed for autonomous vehicles, robotics and connected infrastructure. The plan lines up with Toyota using idealworks' iw.sim technology, which integrates NVIDIA's Mega Omniverse Blueprint, to build a digital twin of its Georgetown, Kentucky, facility.
Part of a wider NVIDIA-Japan sweep
The Toyota deal is one leg of a Japan-wide NVIDIA push this week that also includes a 27,500-Rubin-GPU national AI factory with Noetra under METI's FRONTia Project, an expanded partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Nemotron adoption by SoftBank Corp.'s SB Intuitions and Stockmark. Together the announcements make Japan the largest sovereign-compute physical-AI training environment outside the United States and lay a foundation for Japan's stated goal of capturing 30% of the $133 billion global AI robotics market by 2040. It also builds on NVIDIA's earlier Isaac GR00T 1.7 and Cosmos 3 releases for physical-AI developers.
Reporting based on coverage from Bloomberg, The Japan Times, and Nikkei Asia.