Nvidia, Toyota expand AI partnership to factories and smart cities

Nvidia ↗ 2.30% and Toyota announced Thursday a broad expansion of their decade-long AI partnership, extending collaboration from autonomous driving into factory automation, smart city infrastructure, and urban traffic intelligence systems.

The announcement, timed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Japan this week, marks the companies' most ambitious joint effort to date — moving AI from the data center into the physical world across vehicles, industrial operations, and city infrastructure.theedgemalaysia+1

From Cars to Cities and Factory Floors

The expanded partnership spans several domains. Toyota will build next-generation vehicles with L2++ advanced driver-assistance capabilities on the Nvidia Drive AGX platform, running the safety-certified DriveOS operating system. On the manufacturing side, Toyota plans to deploy Nvidia's Omniverse platform and Isaac Sim framework to create digital twins of its vehicle assembly lines, allowing engineers to virtually model production methods and optimize efficiency.gamesbeat+1

Toyota is also accelerating automotive software development using a code assistant AI model trained with Nvidia's Megatron-LM and referencing Nemotron datasets, enabling engineers to generate and validate safety-critical code more efficiently.gamesbeat

"Physical AI will bring intelligence to every moving machine from cars, robots and trucks to the cities and factories they operate in," said Rishi Dhall, Nvidia's vice president of automotive.gamesbeat

Woven City and Urban Intelligence

As part of Toyota's broader smart city ambitions, Woven by Toyota — the automaker's subsidiary — has developed the Woven City AI Vision Engine, a multimodal vision language model for urban traffic intelligence built on Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Megatron-Core. The model is designed to interpret real-world conditions and anticipate events across mobility and infrastructure systems.linkedin+1

Toyota will integrate Nvidia's AI platforms into Woven City, its experimental prototype community in Shizuoka Prefecture that serves as a real-world laboratory for emerging technologies.theedgemalaysia

Broader Japan Push

Huang's Japan visit also produced an expanded collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to support next-generation AI data center buildout. Nvidia's vice president of robotics and edge AI, Deepu Talla, noted that Japan's industrial base and developer ecosystem position it to lead in physical AI.finance.yahoo+2

The Toyota alliance originated in 2017 when the automaker selected Nvidia's Drive PX platform for early automated driving trials, and was extended last year when Toyota committed to using Drive AGX Orin for its commercial vehicle fleets.theedgemalaysia