Toyota Motor and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) have a{agreed} to a joint initiative in the field of mobility and AI/telecommunications with the aim of realizing a society with zero traffic accidents. In order to achieve a society with zero traffic accidents, the partners said, it is necessary to take an infrastructure-cooperative approach that constantly connects people, mobility and infrastructure, in addition to the advancement of driving support technology based on data-driven technology in cars and the development of future automated driving technology.

To achieve both of these things, Toyota is developing Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) with safety and security as the top priority. Alongside the evolution of SDV, it will become more important to build infrastructure such as a high-speed, high-quality communication infrastructure, an AI infrastructure that can collect and intelligently process vast amounts of information, and a computing infrastructure.

In this collaboration, NTT, the strengths of which lie in the telecommunications, and Toyota will jointly build a Mobility AI Platform that combines a seamless communications infrastructure with AI and computing platforms that can intelligently process large amounts of data. By doing so, they aim to connect people, mobility, and infrastructure to realize a safe, secure, and sustainable mobility society with no traffic accidents.

Through this initiative, the two companies expect to invest a total of ¥500 billion (US$3.3 billion) by 2030. Starting in 2025, they will begin development of the Mobility AI Platform, and from around 2028 under the three-pronged infrastructure, they will begin social implementation and collaboration with various partners, aiming for widespread adoption from 2030 onwards.

Elements that make up the mobility AI platform include:

• Distributed computing platform (data center). Computing resources (data centers) for analyzing and processing vast amounts of data using AI are installed in distributed locations, utilizing optical communication technology.

• Intelligent communication infrastructure. A system is being built to coordinate human mobility infrastructure through seamless communication that is suitable for various traffic environments and conditions in urban areas, rural areas, and suburbs. In addition to being highly reliable, it also achieves low-latency communication for large volumes of data.

• AI infrastructure. A platform that achieves mobility AI that learns and infers from various data from human mobility infrastructure, based on a distributed computing infrastructure (data center) and intelligent communication infrastructure.