Nikkei Business Reports Collaboration Among Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and FANUC

Nikkei Business’ online edition reported on Sept. 24, 2026, that Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and FANUC are working together. The article covers the three companies’ moves in the context of a scramble for data in robotics and the prospects for domestic AI models. A follow-up report dated Sept. 29 also addressed efforts to organize “tactile” data for robots.

The fact that three major robotics companies are coming together around data infrastructure shows that securing training data, not just selling robots or deploying them in factories, is becoming a condition of competition. The primary-source excerpt provides limited detail on the announcement, so it remains to be confirmed which company will handle what data. At a minimum, however, it indicates that domestic players, including FANUC, are focused on building the foundations for AI models.

What is new in this report is that the collaboration among three major robotics companies—Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and FANUC—is being discussed in the context of securing data, rather than simply developing products. The headline’s phrase “data scramble” suggests that control over which company holds the field data, training data or operational data needed to run robots is becoming a competitive condition. The primary-source excerpt, however, does not explain the specifics of the collaboration or what data will be collected, where or how, so no firm conclusions can be drawn on those points. In our related article, Nikkei Reports FANUC’s U.S. Shift and Parts Supply Chain in the AI Era, the focus was on business operations centered on the United States and securing parts supply chains. The latest report appears to move the discussion beyond supply chains to how data obtained from real-world machines will be accumulated and connected to AI models, rather than focusing solely on building hardware. In other words, parts supply and data preparation are emerging as interconnected prerequisites for deployment. The broader industry implication is that data-collection systems and methods for organizing data are becoming competitive factors alongside the performance of the robots themselves. The supplementary source’s reference to organizing “tactile” data suggests that real-world data may include contact and force information, not just visual input, although the primary source alone does not establish its scope. The next questions are what data the three companies will target, at which stages it will be collected, managed and used, and how they will structure its relationship with domestic AI models. See the original sources for details.

In Japan, relatively few companies have real-world robots and access to field data, making it important to determine who will lead efforts to organize that data. If Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and FANUC are reported together in this context, companies with systems for handling data from real-world machines may gain prominence, alongside those that make controllers and robots.