There’s (industrial) strength in numbers when building AI

The U.S. electrical grid is stressing under the weight of power-hungry AI data centers, the surging EV industry, and the energy transition. Railway companies are searching for ways to capture real-time insights to improve the vast infrastructure of railway systems, from trains to tracks. And factories around the globe are clamoring for greater autonomous optimization to boost performance and streamline supply chains.

As the collision of the industrial and digital worlds continues, individual tech providers are finding it increasingly difficult to support them alone. To be sure, this has little to do with structural challenges like the AI skills gap or aging workforce, or even economic indicators like unemployment and job growth. Industrial suppliers know their industries, while tech providers know the technology, and each comes with myriad disciplines and dynamics to consider, build for, and support.

The exception is Hitachi. With its heritage in industrial equipment manufacturing and operational technology (OT), and decades of development and deployment in data, analytics, and AI, Hitachi is one of the few equipped with both industrial and technical expertise, and a history of innovating solutions for transportation, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and more.

The explosive growth of AI in recent years has driven even tighter collaboration among Hitachi Group companies. Along the way, the company has strategically expanded its external partner program, as well, to bring in leading AI developers, from NVIDIA to OpenAI, to take advantage of the technological investments of these firms.

This unique orchestration of its growing internal and external partner ecosystem is driving innovation at Hitachi, enabling it to solve some of the most complex challenges its customers are facing – from renewable energy distribution to faster, reliable transportation, to optimized autonomous manufacturing.

Synergy, not serendipity

None of this is by accident.

Hitachi’s internal collaboration strategy, dubbed the Synergy Program, is a calculated program to coalesce technical expertise across Hitachi’s Digital Systems and Services (DSS) group companies to solve customer challenges across industries. This includes companies like GlobalLogic, Hitachi Digital Services, Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi Cyber, and Hitachi Digital, as well as its industrial sectors of the mobility, energy, and connective industries. Although such collaboration occurred organically in the past when specific requests arose, today interconnectivity, awareness, and collaboration are strategic and intentional.

“Few companies have such breadth of talent and innovation to draw upon like Hitachi,” said Roslyn Stuart, Vice President, Synergy Creation, Hitachi Digital. “Our strategy is to harness that expertise and tech to help customers solve problems and drive performance.”

When a Hitachi company is faced with a complex customer challenge, Stuart and her team work closely with the engineering team to identify the right Hitachi digital partners to pull in – engage external partners where needed – and assemble a virtual delivery team. In past engagements, these teams have brought together as many as six different Hitachi companies with specialties in areas from digital infrastructure and software engineering to physical AI.

As teams come together, the company responsible for the customer account remains in charge of go-to-market and domain knowledge, while the Synergy team orchestrates the involvement and contributions of the supporting Hitachi companies.

Partnering on synchronicity

Adding to this amalgam of expertise, Hitachi continues to strategically expand its external partner program, pulling in innovation and expertise from leading AI developers – from NVIDIA to OpenAI – to co-create solutions for industry.

Over the past two years alone, the company has forged or strengthened partnerships and collaborations around AI, cloud and data centers, with the likes of NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, AWS, SingTel and most recently, OpenAI. 

But there’s more to partnering than meets the eye.

“Making partnerships work is not easy,” says Frank Antonysamy, Chief Growth Officer, Hitachi Digital. “They need to align with the strategic vision of the company, and they need support from the top down, from the CEO.”

One key to Hitachi’s success, Antonysamy says, is its 360-degree partnership model, an approach that goes beyond traditional sell-with, sell-to, and buy-from arrangements. Hitachi and its partners actively co-create or “build with” each other, creating joint IP and solutions. These partnerships are designed to benefit both Hitachi and the partner, creating value that neither could generate alone.

For example, GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, helps Google deploy Gemini, its flagship AI model, to enterprise customers, while Google’s AI powers Hitachi’s Lumada solutions. Likewise, Hitachi plans to provide OpenAI with cooling systems and storage for new data centers, while OpenAI’s models will be integrated into Hitachi’s growing HMAX platform.

“When we’re partnering with these companies, we’re using their products, but they’re also buying from us,” says Rio Kurokawa, Vice President and Chief Lumada Business Officer who leads AI transformation at Hitachi. “They want energy solutions from us; transportation solutions, etc. It’s more symbiotic than traditional partnerships.”

It helps that Hitachi comes to the table with a breadth of experience building everything from transformers to trains, and from digital infrastructure to agents. The company understands the power of partnership like few others. It’s an ethos that is only amplified with advance of industrial AI, a fast-growing pillar within the physical AI market.

Industry in the crosshairs

Complex, industrial problems demand a convergence of capabilities—chips, models, domain expertise, physical assets, system integration—that no single company possesses. Consultancies may have integration skills but lack access to actual trains and transformers. Chip makers may have compute power but no experience running a power grid.

“When you combine IT technology with OT technology, it gets messy,” says Kurokawa. “Most industrial environments are regulated and safety critical. You don’t have those issues on the consumer side. That’s why industrial AI requires smart, able partners who bring standards, who can integrate, and who are compliant.”

Antonysamy agreed. “What a lot of companies in our space don’t have is actual physical assets and domain expertise,” he said. “We’re not hunting for a unicorn at Hitachi. We already have an existing customer for deploying these complex technologies with equally complex business models – it’s us.”

To that extent, Hitachi often plays the role of customer zero. “We build these solutions across our own environments, build the playbooks, create Hitachi IP and validate them at scale,” says Hitachi’s Stuart. “Only then do we take them to external customers.”

Putting it all together to solve the world’s hardest problems

With such fire power in its internal and external collaborations, Hitachi can move fast enough to tackle problems others avoid.

“We look for real-world problems and accelerate the development of digital and AI solutions through our integrated teams,” Stuart says. “As a result, clients see tangible outcomes sooner, rather than proof of concepts that never move beyond a lab.”

Southwest Power Pool (SPP) had one of these tough challenges. SPP manages the electric grid across 14 states, from North Dakota to Louisiana. It was wrestling with a thorny industry challenge: Connecting new power sources to the grid requires exhaustive analysis that currently takes 18 to 27 months. As a result, more than twice the nation’s current generating capacity sits waiting in a backlog.

Hitachi is working with SPP, partnering with NVIDIA, to build solutions that reflect the needs of grid complexities of today – not from decades ago. This requires, in addition to the existing capabilities of SPP, NVIDIA and Hitachi building new solvers and algorithms that can handle this scale of data. To conduct the fundamental research for that, the troupe brought in expertise from Hitachi America’s R&D team.

The result: Hitachi gets a better solution for SPP. NVIDIA gets a real-world test case that improves its product for everyone.

The power of Hitachi’s partnership model was also on display in late 2024 when it rolled out an early version of HMAX. This AI-powered platform uses sensors on trains and infrastructure, allowing volumes of data to be processed at the edge in real time.

The project involved the orchestration of development between Hitachi Rail, GlobalLogic, Hitachi Digital Services, and NVIDIA. Not surprisingly, when the innovative muscle of such companies comes together, things happen quickly. HMAX went from the inception, the very first conversation, to the actual product launch (at InnoTrans in September 2024), in less than five months.

“Being able to work as ‘One Hitachi’ with our industrial companies, with our digital & AI companies, such as GlobalLogic, we can very quickly have AI engineers and architects available,” said Stuart, who along with Antonysamy were instrumental in the development. And she emphasized that it was the kind of challenge that a single provider simply could not have supported.

Hitachi has now evolved HMAX to transcend multiple industries. Just this month, the company announced “HMAX by Hitachi,” a full suite of next-generation solutions that brings the power of AI to the physical world. Derived from the original HMAX design principles, the suite integrates an array of advanced technologies from Hitachi and partners to dramatically improve reliability and performance of systems across the energy, mobility and manufacturing industries.

“Our internal and external partner ecosystem often reveals capabilities we didn’t even know we had,” Kurokawa said. “Our partners’ tools improve from solving our problems. Our solutions accelerate from their technology. That’s the only way you can solve problems this hard.”

For more on Hitachi’s extensive work in industrial AI visit: AI Resource Center – Hitachi Digital