US tech giant Nvidia has expanded its partnership with Japanese car maker Toyota to advance physical AI across automotive, robotics and smart cities.

From self-driving cars to smart cities, the next era of mobility will be defined by AI-enabled systems that can perceive, reason and safely act in the physical world. Toyota and Nvidia are working together to build that future, connecting AI across vehicles, infrastructure and industrial operations.

This builds on last year’s announcement that Toyota will develop vehicles with advanced driver-assistance capabilities (L2++) built on Nvidia Drive AGX (developer.nvidia.com/drive/agx) and running the safety-certified Nvidia DriveOs (developer.nvidia.com/drive/os) operating system.

Nvidia has enabled Toyota to tap into its accelerated computing, AI software and simulation technologies to develop safer, more intelligent vehicles, optimise automotive engineering workflows, fine-tune factory operations and power urban intelligence systems, in support of the company’s vision for safer mobility.

“Physical AI will bring intelligence to every moving machine from cars, robots and trucks to the cities and factories they operate in,” said Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive at Nvidia (www.nvidia.com). “Together, Toyota and Nvidia are building the AI infrastructure for a new era of mobility, where vehicles can become more autonomous, manufacturing more AI-defined and urban environments more intelligent, responsive and safe.”

Using Nvidia technology, Toyota is building vehicles that will deliver L2++ functionality, enabling more intelligent, context-aware driving while maintaining rigorous safety standards.

As vehicles become increasingly software-defined, Toyota is accelerating vehicle software engineering with a Misra-compliant code assistant AI model, trained and fine-tuned using Nvidia Megatron-LM, and referencing various datasets including Nvidia Nemotron. By applying a custom automotive AI model to improve automotive-specific code generation and review, Toyota engineers can generate, review and validate safety-critical code more efficiently, accelerating development while adhering to stringent automotive compliance.

Toyota is bringing simulation to the manufacturing floor using Nvidia Omniverse libraries and the Isaac Sim open framework for factory and robotics workflows, robot movement simulation, and broader digital-twin environments to optimise manufacturing operations. This simulation-first approach reduces downtime, improves efficiency, lowers costs and enables continuous optimisation across production environments.

Toyota (global.toyota) has developed a multimodal vision language model for urban traffic intelligence, using Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Megatron-Core. The model is designed to help interpret real-world conditions, anticipate what happens next and support responses across mobility and infrastructure systems.