NVIDIA deepens Japan AI ecosystem with new supercomputers, Metropolis vision-AI skills, and a 30-year SEGA partnership

NVIDIA on July 15, 2026 detailed a sweep of new AI and robotics partnerships across Japan, spanning pharmaceutical manufacturing, banking, quantum computing, industrial vision, and gaming, alongside new Blackwell-powered supercomputer deployments in the country.

What's new

• Healthcare and life sciences: Eisai, Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo, Ono Pharmaceuticals, Canon, Fujifilm, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are named as partners applying NVIDIA AI to drug discovery and manufacturing.
• Vision AI: OMRON, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Shimizu Corporation, and Yazaki North America are adopting NVIDIA's Metropolis platform, which NVIDIA says now includes more than 80 new "skills" for industrial vision applications, and which NVIDIA credits with roughly a 6x speedup in vision-AI development.
• Financial services: Mizuho, SMBC Group, and Rakuten Bank are deploying NVIDIA AI infrastructure for services such as fraud detection and customer operations.
• Quantum computing: RIKEN, Mitsubishi Chemical, Keio University, and Fujitsu are using a new Blackwell-based system, with NVIDIA citing a 13.4x speedup on a quantum-chemistry workflow.
• Compute: Japan's RIKYU supercomputer will run on 1,600 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs; a separate system, ROQUO, uses 540 Blackwell GPUs.
• Automotive and entertainment: NVIDIA highlighted continued automotive work with Toyota and a 30-year partnership with SEGA extending into gaming.

Context

Japan has been one of NVIDIA's most active international pushes this year, as the company works to embed its GPUs and software stack — from Blackwell silicon to the Metropolis vision-AI platform — across the country's largest industrial conglomerates. Rather than introducing a single new product, this announcement bundles several previously separate initiatives across healthcare, finance, quantum research, and industrial vision into one coordinated release.

Why it matters

The breadth of named partners — pharma majors, the country's largest banks, and RIKEN's quantum research group — signals NVIDIA's "AI factory" strategy is moving from pilot deployments to production infrastructure inside Japan's biggest companies. The Metropolis speedup claim and the RIKYU/ROQUO Blackwell deployments give a concrete data point for how much industrial compute is now running on NVIDIA's newest architecture outside the US, at a time when data-center capacity remains one of the tightest constraints on global AI adoption.