FANUC Partners with NVIDIA to Introduce AI Capabilities Across All Robot Product Lines

FANUC, a leading Japanese industrial robot manufacturer, has established a comprehensive partnership with NVIDIA and decided to apply AI functions to all of its over 200 industrial robot models. At the earnings announcement on April 24, President Kenji Yamaguchi forecast that consolidated operating profit for the fiscal year ending March 2027 would reach 212.2 billion yen (approximately 1.9668 trillion won), a 15% increase year-on-year, marking the highest profit in nine years. FANUC has abandoned its long-held closed vertical integration strategy, opting to open-source its robot control software and integrate NVIDIA GPU-based AI computing across its entire product lineup.

This decision represents a strategic shift driven by the realization that hardware performance alone can no longer provide differentiation. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the global market share of Japanese robots, which was 80% in the 1990s, has fallen to about 40% last year, with Chinese companies such as ESTUN and Inovance rapidly filling the gap with low-cost offerings. FANUC's adoption of the "Physical AI" concept—embedding AI that digitizes on-site data and skilled workers' tacit knowledge into robots—exemplifies Japan's survival strategy as a manufacturing powerhouse trying to avoid ceding software sovereignty to U.S. big tech. This move aligns with similar Physical AI strategies presented by Germany's Siemens and Beckhoff at Hannover Messe 2026, aiming to protect the last bastion of "on-site data" amid China's low-cost hardware and U.S. software dominance.

FANUC's open-source initiative and NVIDIA partnership signal a shift in the competitive axis of the industrial robot market from hardware specifications to software ecosystems. In the short term, the customer base seeking AI applications in automotive and IT industries is expected to expand. In the medium to long term, new automation solutions combining FANUC's vast on-site data with NVIDIA's AI computing power are likely to emerge. However, risks remain, including changes in revenue models due to open-sourcing and potential customer attrition from the existing closed ecosystem.