Hitachi
Japanese industrial and digital conglomerate building physical AI under its HMAX portfolio
- Hitachi and FANUC pair edge AI chips with industrial robots, aiming for a global physical AI rollout from fiscal 2027
Hitachi and FANUC signed a strategic partnership on Sept. 30 to commercialize physical AI jointly, combining Hitachi's HMAX Industry software and in-house edge AI semiconductor with FANUC robots. Trials start in Hitachi's Ibaraki-area plants as “Customer Zero,” with global sales planned from fiscal 2027. No financial terms were disclosed.
Subject - Hitachi and Agile Robots agree to build a shared physical AI brain for factories, sold through HMAX Industry
Hitachi has reached a basic agreement with Munich's Agile Robots to fuse their AI models into a robot "brain" for factory work and pair it with Hitachi's edge AI chips, then sell the results globally through HMAX Industry. No financial terms or launch dates were disclosed, and the deal came a day before Hitachi's separate physical AI partnership with FANUC.
Subject - D-Robotics raises US$400 million to sell its Sunrise chips as the compute layer for China's robot makers
D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.
Mentioned - NVIDIA pitches factory digital twins and Thor robot computers as the toolkit for US reindustrialization, enlisting Foxconn, Siemens, FANUC and four robot developers
At GTC Washington on October 28, 2025, NVIDIA expanded its Mega Omniverse Blueprint for factory-scale digital twins, with Siemens, FANUC and Foxconn among the first partners, and named Figure, Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics and Skild AI as robot developers on its stack. It also unveiled IGX Thor, a 5,581 FP4 teraflop industrial and medical edge computer due in December 2025.
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