Nvidia shares edged higher on Thursday after CEO Jensen Huang confirmed a wave of new and expanded partnerships with major Japanese corporations during a visit to Tokyo. The deals span automotive, robotics, pharmaceutical, and medical imaging sectors, underlining the chipmaker’s push to become the foundational AI platform across industries.
The most notable announcement was an expanded collaboration with Toyota Motor Corporation. The world’s largest automaker will deploy Nvidia’s AI hardware and software across its factories, mobility projects, and the Woven City smart city initiative. Toyota plans to use Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to create digital twins of vehicle production lines in Shizuoka Prefecture, enabling simulation and optimization before physical changes are made. This builds on a relationship that began in 2017 around autonomous driving and, since January 2025, includes the Drive AGX Orin platform and DriveOS for future vehicles.
Huang also confirmed partnerships with Japan’s robotics leaders Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric, aiming to accelerate intelligent machine development. “With AI, robots will become smart, easily adaptable and accessible,” Huang told media in Tokyo. The companies will leverage Nvidia’s Cosmos, Isaac, Metropolis, and Jetson platforms. The CEO’s visit included a Sega Sammy event in Akihabara and meetings with chip supply chain executives from Kioxia and Tokyo Electron.
In healthcare, major Japanese pharma firms are adopting Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform for AI-driven drug discovery. Astellas is using nearly all BioNeMo NIM microservices and the Agent Toolkit, Ono Pharmaceuticals deployed Boltz-2 NIM for internal discovery, and Daiichi Sankyo runs ultra-large virtual screening on the Tokyo-1 platform. Takeda is collaborating to deploy Boltz biomolecular models. Startup SyntheticGestalt launched ZAO and KOYA, models that plug into the BioNeMo toolkit.
Medical imaging also saw advances: Canon launched Japan’s first Nvidia-accelerated photon-counting CT system, and Fujifilm commercialized the country’s first whole-body CT system powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, using diffusion-based deep learning for image enhancement. Kawasaki Heavy Industries plans surgical support robots using Holoscan IGX and Isaac, while Direava is building a surgical vision language model.
The string of announcements comes as AI demand continues to surge globally. ASML raised its sales forecast this week, and TSMC is expected to report a fifth consecutive quarter of record earnings, driven by AI chip orders. Nvidia’s stock was up 0.33% on the day, reflecting investor optimism about its deepening industrial footprint in the world’s third-largest economy.
