TLDR
- Nvidia is partnering with Japanese firms Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric to advance robotics and AI development.
- CEO Jensen Huang made the announcement at a media event in Tokyo, saying AI will make robots “smart, easily adaptable and accessible.”
- Japanese pharma companies including Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo, and Ono Pharmaceuticals are using Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform for AI-driven drug discovery.
- Canon and Fujifilm have launched next-generation CT systems built on Nvidia GPUs, marking a first for Japan’s medical imaging sector.
- Huang’s Japan visit follows ASML raising its sales forecast, with TSMC expected to post a fifth consecutive quarter of record earnings on the back of AI demand.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang touched down in Tokyo this week, and he didn’t come alone — he brought a full roster of partnership announcements with him. Nvidia’s stock was up 0.33% as the news filtered through.
Huang confirmed partnerships with Japanese robotics companies Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric to push forward AI and robotics development. “With AI, robots will become smart, easily adaptable and accessible,” he said at a media event in the Japanese capital.
Huang also attended a Sega Sammy event in Akihabara and was photographed with the CEOs of Kioxia and Tokyo Electron — two key names in Japan’s chipmaking supply chain.
Japan invented modern manufacturing.
Now, its innovators are building on NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Isaac, NVIDIA Metropolis, and NVIDIA Jetson to accelerate the deployment of intelligent machines.
Japan’s strengths in robotics, manufacturing, automotive, telecommunications, and…
— NVIDIA Newsroom (@nvidianewsroom) July 16, 2026
The CEO has achieved something close to celebrity status in Asia. A Taiwanese tourist outside the Sega event summed it up bluntly: “I think he’s the most influential man on Earth.”
Drug Discovery Gets an AI Upgrade
Beyond robotics, Nvidia’s Japanese healthcare push is gathering pace. Several of Japan’s top pharmaceutical companies are now using Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform for AI-accelerated drug discovery.
Astellas has deployed nearly all BioNeMo NIM microservices and is running the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit. Ono Pharmaceuticals is using the Boltz-2 NIM microservice to speed up internal drug discovery. Daiichi Sankyo is running ultralarge-scale virtual screening on Tokyo-1, Japan’s AI drug discovery platform operated by Xeureka.
Takeda has also announced a collaboration with Boltz to deploy BoltzMol-1 and BoltzProt-1 biomolecular models across its research teams for structure prediction and generative design.
Startup SyntheticGestalt announced two new products: ZAO, a molecular AI foundation model that ranked No. 1 on nine public drug-discovery benchmark tasks, and KOYA, a generative model that designs novel ligands for target proteins. Both plug into the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit.
AI Moves Into Japan’s Hospitals
On the medical imaging front, two of Japan’s biggest names have made moves. Canon launched Japan’s first Nvidia-accelerated photon-counting CT system. Fujifilm commercialized Japan’s first whole-body CT system powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, using diffusion-based deep learning to improve image quality.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries is also in the mix, planning to use Nvidia’s Holoscan IGX and Isaac platforms to develop surgical support and nursing assistant robots.
Direava is building a surgical vision language model for real-time video understanding inside operating rooms, aiming to turn it into an intelligence layer for future surgical AI.
The broader AI investment picture remains strong. ASML raised its sales forecast on Wednesday and pledged capacity expansion. TSMC is expected to report a fifth straight quarter of record earnings when it posts results Thursday, driven by AI chip demand.
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