KDDI's ELYZA Robotics plans ¥30 billion of R&D and 1,000 robots on real sites by fiscal 2030

KDDI and ELYZA have set up ELYZA Robotics, a company that will run the KDDI Group's physical AI business and began operating on Oct 1, the two companies announced on Oct 27. Through fiscal 2030 the KDDI Group plans to invest ¥30 billion in research and development, build a physical AI team of more than 300 people and put more than 1,000 robots to work at real sites.

The plan is built around buying robots, not making them. ELYZA Robotics will procure industrial robots, quadruped robots, humanoids and other machines from domestic and overseas makers, adjust them by industry and task, and supply them to customers. The ¥30 billion is a KDDI Group R&D figure, and the release does not say how much of it goes to the new company.

The models are home-grown, the hardware is bought

ELYZA Robotics will still develop its own robot foundation models, including vision-language models and vision-language-action models, building on work at ELYZA and KDDI Research. It will also collect egocentric data, meaning work recorded from a person's point of view, and build simulators that reproduce work sites.

That work will run on KDDI's own infrastructure: its telecom network, a nationwide low-latency network and AI compute platform called Digital Belt, and a remote-monitoring hub, the Mobility Control Center. Nikkei reports that KDDI will be among the first to adopt NVIDIA's next-generation chips to develop the robots' AI.

Retail, logistics and factories come first

Proofs of concept at a wide range of sites start in 2026, followed by a phased rollout. The companies name stocktaking, shelf stocking and customer service in retail; heavy transport and out-of-stock detection in logistics; and precision work in manufacturing. Services follow, with agriculture and construction as later targets.

KDDI Group companies including Lawson, Altius Link, KDDI iret, KDDI Technology, LAC and Soracom will supply sites or technical skills. ELYZA Robotics will also build two platforms: one for model development and field data, and one for running robots on site, covering distributed inference, remote monitoring and multi-robot coordination.

The release cites a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimate that Japan could be short of on-site workers in production, construction and services in 2040.

According to the company profile in the release, ELYZA Robotics has a stated capital of ¥100 million, or one three-hundredth of the group's ¥30 billion R&D figure.