KDDI Group Launches ELYZA Robotics for Physical AI

Japanese telecoms group KDDI and its AI developer ELYZA have launched ELYZA Robotics, a new Tokyo company that will build AI models to run robots in shops, warehouses and factories. The companies announced it on 27 October in releases from the KDDI newsroom and ELYZA, and say the company began operating on 1 October.

The KDDI group says it will invest ¥30bn (about $190m, or £143m) in research and development by fiscal 2030. Its goal is to have more than 1,000 robots working in real workplaces by then.

In brief

ELYZA Robotics will develop robot foundation models and the systems to run fleets of robots over KDDI’s network.
It will buy robot hardware, including humanoid, four-legged and industrial machines, from Japanese and overseas partners.
Trials start in 2026 with KDDI group companies including the Lawson convenience-store chain.

What ELYZA Robotics will build

ELYZA is best known in Japan for Japanese-language large language models. The new company applies that work to what the industry calls physical AI: models that see a scene, understand an instruction and turn it into movement.

The releases say ELYZA Robotics will develop vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) for robots. To train them, it plans to collect first-person, or egocentric, video of people doing tasks and to rebuild real work sites in simulators. That is a similar data strategy to Amap’s λ0 humanoid model, which Alibaba’s mapping unit trained on human video.

The company will run two platforms. One is for research and development. The other is for operations, covering distributed inference, remote monitoring and coordinating several robots at once. It will use KDDI’s mobile network, a low-latency computing network KDDI calls the “Digital Belt”, and its Mobility Control Center (MCC), a remote-monitoring hub.

ELYZA Robotics does not plan to make its own robots. It will source industrial, four-legged and humanoid robots from domestic and overseas partners and supply the software that runs them.

Where the robots would work

The first targets are retail, logistics and manufacturing. In shops, the releases list stocktaking, shelf filling and customer service. In logistics, they list carrying heavy loads and spotting empty shelves. In factories, they point to precise assembly work. Service jobs come next, with agriculture and construction later.

Proof-of-concept trials start in 2026. KDDI group companies named as partners include Lawson, call-centre operator Altius Link, cloud firm KDDI iret, KDDI Technology, security company LAC and IoT provider Soracom.

The companies justify the plan with projections from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of serious labour shortages by 2040. KDDI says it now has a physical AI organisation of more than 300 people across the group.

ELYZA Robotics is based in Bunkyo, Tokyo, with capital of ¥100m (about $635,000). Its president is Yuya Soneoka, chief executive of ELYZA. In TSN’s translation, he said the aim was a society in which robots working alongside people is taken as “normal”.

The dollar and sterling figures use European Central Bank reference rates for 26 October 2026.

A network operator wants to be the robot’s operating layer

KDDI’s bet is different from that of most robotics companies TSN covers. Figure and Agility build their own machines; Figure has just reached design lock on its Figure 04 humanoid. ELYZA Robotics leaves the hardware to others and aims to own the layer above it: the AI models, the data, and the network and control centre that keep a fleet running.

That plays to what a telecoms operator already has. Remote monitoring and coordinating many robots both need reliable, low-delay connections, and KDDI sells exactly that. The group also has ready-made test sites in Lawson’s shops and its other group companies, which gives it real workplaces to collect data from without first winning outside customers.

The numbers are modest, and they are targets. More than 1,000 robots across several industries by fiscal 2030 is a small fleet next to the warehouse plans of logistics groups such as GXO, which is adding sites for Agility’s Digit humanoids. ¥30bn over several years is also small next to the sums raised by US robot makers such as Bedrock Robotics.

The releases say outside partner companies will join trials, but name none, and give no prices. The first sign of whether the approach works will be the 2026 trials, and whether any of them move beyond the group’s own shops and offices.