Japan's financial, pharma and manufacturing sectors deploy NVIDIA AI infrastructure at scale
From drug discovery to robotics to banking transactions, Japanese enterprises are adopting NVIDIA accelerators and foundation models across healthcare, finance and supply chains.
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Japanese banks, pharmaceutical firms and manufacturers are moving AI workloads onto NVIDIA infrastructure, with deployments ranging from transaction modeling to drug discovery to surgical robotics.
Financial services expand agent deployments
Rakuten Bank, which manages over 18 million banking accounts, 33 million credit cards and 14 million brokerage accounts across the Rakuten Group's ecosystem of more than 70 services, plans to develop transaction foundation models built with NVIDIA Agent Toolkit. Mizuho Bank aims to safely expand the operational scope of autonomous agents into core workflows including information gathering, document creation, analysis and system development support. Mizuho also plans to build what is expected to be the largest on-premises AI factory in Japan's financial industry, starting with NVIDIA DGX B200 systems. The Japan Research Institute, the core IT company of SMBC Group, deployed an AI factory using NVIDIA Nemotron open models.
Drug discovery and biotech acceleration
Tokyo-1, an AI drug discovery consortium operated by Xeureka, includes pharma companies Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo and Ono Pharmaceuticals advancing drug discovery using NVIDIA BioNeMo. Astellas has deployed nearly all BioNeMo NIM microservices and is running BioNeMo Agent Toolkit. Daiichi Sankyo is conducting ultralarge-scale virtual screening on Tokyo-1 and leveraging NVIDIA RAPIDS to accelerate large-scale data processing. Ono Pharmaceuticals is using the Boltz-2 NIM microservice to accelerate internal drug discovery. Eisai joined Tokyo-1 in April.
Takeda announced a collaboration with Boltz to deploy BoltzMol-1 and BoltzProt-1 biomolecular models across its research organization. Biomy is pioneering a virtual cell foundation model using a massive clinical dataset from the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research and achieved 90% faster spatial transcriptomics analysis using NVIDIA single-cell RAPIDS. Biomy will use NVIDIA Nemotron-powered agents to autonomously propose and orchestrate complex virtual experiments for drug development.
SyntheticGestalt announced two products: ZAO, a molecular AI foundation model that ranked No. 1 on nine public drug-discovery benchmark tasks, and KOYA, a molecular generative model that designs novel, high-affinity ligands for target proteins while reflecting user intent.
Quantum-classical hybrid research infrastructure
Two supercomputers driven by NVIDIA GB200 and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 are beginning operations at RIKEN, Japan's leading national comprehensive research institute. RIKYU supercomputer deploys 1,600 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs using the GB200 NVL4 platform and will support RIKEN's development of open foundation models across life sciences, materials science and laboratory automation.
ROQUO is a quantum-HPC system integrating quantum processors with 540 Blackwell GPUs accessed through the GB200 NVL4 platform and is connected to on-premises quantum computers at RIKEN's facilities in Wako and Kobe, including Quantinuum's trapped-ion Reimei system. Researchers at ROQUO are beginning to explore an evolutionary AI framework integrated with the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform for quantum-classical computing.
Mitsubishi Chemical, Mizuho Bank, Keio University, AIST, the University of Toronto and NVIDIA demonstrated an AI- and GPU-driven workflow for harnessing quantum processors in molecular spectral analysis. NVIDIA GPUs achieved a 13.4x speedup for quantum chemistry workflows over CPU-only nodes. Fujitsu has started trial of NVQLink to determine if it can be used for efficient control of their quantum-classical hybrid computing environment. Fujitsu and NVIDIA are investigating efficient ways to use NVIDIA CUDA-Q for large-scale quantum-chemistry simulation. NVIDIA is working with AIST's Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI Technology (AIST G-QuAT) to bring state-of-the-art AI to quantum processor systems.
Robotics and manufacturing automation
Kawasaki Heavy Industries plans to use NVIDIA Holoscan IGX, Isaac for Healthcare, Isaac GR00T and Cosmos to develop surgical support, nursing assistant and hospital transport robots.
Canon launched Japan's first NVIDIA-accelerated photon-counting CT system. Fujifilm commercialized Japan's first whole-body CT system powered by NVIDIA Blackwell using diffusion-based deep learning reconstruction. Direava is developing a surgical vision language model for real-time surgical video understanding and natural language interaction with surgical scenes.
Japan's industrial and smart-space leaders including Asilla, AWL, Fujitsu, Hitachi, OMRON, Shimizu Corporation and Yazaki North America are using Metropolis. NVIDIA Metropolis packages more than 80 new skills including NVIDIA VSS Blueprint 3.2, NVIDIA DeepStream 9.1, NVIDIA TAO 7 and Physical AI Data Factory. NVIDIA Metropolis can help developers speed up vision AI agent development by at least 6x.
Fujitsu Kozuchi AI platform combines VSS with Agentic Memory technology to transform long-duration video into operational knowledge. Hitachi HMAX solutions use VSS-powered agents to identify issues and generate actionable insights in buildings and rail infrastructure. Shimizu Corporation is piloting VSS for construction worker safety. Asilla is monitoring public spaces and commercial facilities to detect incidents and improve response time using DeepStream and VLMs. AWL is building retail and manufacturing solutions with DeepStream. OMRON is enhancing automated inspections with VSS-powered video analytics agents.
DeepHow is helping Yazaki North America automate time and motion studies, reducing the current process from weeks to days.
Strategic partnerships and ecosystem development
SoftBank and NVIDIA confirmed joint initiatives to drive Japanese innovation using open models including NVIDIA Nemotron and SB Intuitions' Sarashina. SoftBank is using NVIDIA's full stack including GB200-class AI infrastructure, NVIDIA RTX PRO-based AI RAN with NVIDIA AI Aerial platform, and NVIDIA Nemotron-based large telecom models. Ippu Senkin is collaborating with a financial institution to build sovereign financial intelligence using NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and Local AI Agent.