Fifth Annual · Tokyo · October 13, 2026

Industrial AI
Sovereignty.

The intelligence that runs the fab, the grid, and the line — and who owns it. One day, one room, the leaders of the twenty-five-trillion-dollar industrial and semiconductor economy.

One day Limited attendance Tokyo
Become a sponsor

Hosted by the Industrial AI Federation

IIAC

International Industrial AI Conference

Fifth Annual · Tokyo · October 13

The Convening

It would be an honor to welcome you to Tokyo — to consider, among equals, what sovereignty over industrial intelligence will mean for the next generation.

The Industrial AI Federation Convening since 2021


Since 2021, IIAC has gathered the heads of nations, fabs, and faculties who shape how intelligence is built into the physical world. After four editions at Stanford and a 2025 convening in Ha Noi, the fifth moves to the industrial capital of the world — Tokyo — for a single, deliberate day on the question beneath every other question: who governs the intelligence that runs the factory, the grid, and the supply chain?

Expect the room to look like the global industrial-AI establishment — the chip giants and their equipment and materials suppliers, the hyperscalers, the founders of the industrial-AI stack — gathered in the city where much of it is built: Honeywell, IBM, Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek; Panasonic, Tokyo Electron, JSR, Renesas, Furuno, CTC; the policy leads of the ministries and parliament; and the venture capitalists who fund them all. Attendance is limited to preserve the conversation.

The Room

Keynote speakers.

Four voices open the day — industrial AI, frontier research, national AI policy, and the systems that run the physical world.

Keynote

Christopher Nguyen

CEO & Co-Founder · Aitomatic · Chief Architect of Project Tapestry

Built and led industrial-AI programs across Panasonic’s global factories before the category had a name. At Aitomatic, he leads DanaOS and the Cognitive Ontology, the knowledge infrastructure behind Project Tapestry’s industrial frontier.

Keynote

Yann LeCun

Founder and Chairman · AMI Labs · Chief Scientist · Project Tapestry

Turing Award winner and one of the founding figures of deep learning. At AMI Labs, he is advancing autonomous machine intelligence through world models, self-supervised learning, energy-based models, and research toward machines that can reason and plan.

Keynote

Akihisa Shiozaki

House of Representatives · Director General for AI and for Intelligence Strategy · LDP

Stanford- and Wharton-trained, he co-authored the LDP’s AI Whitepaper and now holds the party’s dual mandate for AI and intelligence strategy — driving Japan’s policy on AI sovereignty and its place in the global AI landscape.

Keynote

Suresh Venkatarayalu

President & CTO · Honeywell

Runs technology across Honeywell’s industrial portfolio — aviation, energy, buildings, and automation — including Honeywell Forge, the enterprise platform bringing AI into factories, assets, supply chains, and industrial operations.

The Program · One Day

October 13, 2026 · Tokyo

A single day, a single track. The program is curated by the Program Committee around the three sovereignties — anchored by Project Tapestry. The detailed sessions are still being shaped; what follows is the shape of the day.

Morning
Keynotes opening each sovereignty
Midday
Hosted luncheon · Project Tapestry
Afternoon
Case studies from the line · closing keynote
Evening
Leadership Dinner Reception
The Room

Speakers & guests.

Around the keynotes, expect the chairs and CTOs of the global industrial-AI establishment — from Honeywell, IBM, Nvidia, and Qualcomm to Panasonic, Tokyo Electron, JSR, and Renesas — alongside the ministry officials, parliamentarians, and venture capitalists who decide where the capital flows.

Hiroshi Kutsumi

Managing Executive Officer, CTO · Panasonic Corp.

Chief Technology Officer of Panasonic Corp. Previously, he led the Digital & AI Technology Center, the group's engine for scalable, responsible AI across batteries, appliances, factories, supply chains, and partner industrial companies.

Anthony J. Annunziata

AI Open Innovation · IBM · Program Chair

Co-founded and co-chairs the AI Alliance and leads IBM’s open-source AI ecosystem. He leads Project Tapestry’s coalition, model governance, developer community, and open infrastructure.

Toshikazu Okuya

Toshikazu Okuya

Deputy Director-General · Commerce and Information Policy Bureau

Deputy Director-General of the Commerce and Information Policy Bureau at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), helping shape industrial, digital, and information policy at the intersection of technology, competitiveness, and economic security.

Teruhide Sato

Founder & CEO · BEENEXT

Founder and CEO of BEENEXT, whose portfolio includes SixSense for AI-powered manufacturing defect detection and Haberwater for industrial water and energy optimization. Previously, he co-founded BEENOS, taking it public in 2004.

Mika Tanaka

Director · Furuno Electric

Co-author of Llamarine, the first open-source LLM for maritime navigation. Her work with Furuno, Aitomatic, and the AI Alliance applies domain-specific AI to safety, compliance, and vessel operations.

Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Founder · BharatGen · IIT Bombay

Founded and directs BharatGen, India’s government-backed sovereign foundation-model initiative for 22 official languages, bringing national-scale data, language, compute, and model capacity into Project Tapestry.

Hung Bui

VP of Technology, AI Research, Qualcomm

Runs AI research at Qualcomm AI Research, advancing the on-device and edge intelligence that moves sovereign models onto phones, vehicles, industrial sensors, and embedded systems.

Thuc Vu

Co-founder · OhmniLabs · Nvidia

Founded OhmniLabs in service robotics and Katango in social AI, later acquired by Google. Now at Nvidia, he works near the accelerated-compute stack behind frontier models.

Charles Kawashima

VP, AI & Information Systems · Renesas

Leads Renesas’ global AI and Information Systems division across enterprise AI, IT, cybersecurity, infrastructure, platforms, business systems, and digital services, turning technology programs into productivity, resilience, and enterprise value.

Da-Shan Shiu

MediaTek

Leads advanced wireless and AI connectivity at MediaTek, whose silicon puts intelligence into phones, connected devices, vehicles, and industrial endpoints across global consumer and industrial markets.

Daisuke Oku

GL (Group Leader) · Tokyo Electron

Built his career writing control software for Tokyo Electron’s wafer-processing equipment, and now brings AI agents and SemiKong, the open-source semiconductor LLM he helped propose, onto the fab floor.

Konobu Kimura

Director · Furuno Intelligent Lab

Leads Furuno Intelligent Lab, bringing AI into the sensing, navigation, communication, and monitoring stack behind marine radar, bridge systems, fishing-vessel sonar, coastal monitoring, GNSS timing, and industrial positioning.

Koki Takahashi

GM, AI Business · CTC

Leads AI Business in CTC’s Industrial Business Division, helping industrial customers connect AI infrastructure, data platforms, systems integration, and operational technology into production-ready transformation programs.

Kazushi Osumi

MG, AI Business · ITOCHU Techno-Solutions

Promotes AI Business in ITOCHU Techno-Solutions’ AI Business Department, helping industrial customers connect AI infrastructure, data platforms, systems integration, and operational technology into production-ready transformation programs.

Tomoki Nagai

GM, Materials Informatics · JSR

Leads JSR’s Materials Informatics Initiative, combining nearly two decades of expertise in photoresists and semiconductor materials with AI to transform how advanced materials are discovered and developed.

Yoshikuni Hirayama

Aitomatic (Japan)

Heads Aitomatic’s Tokyo operations, bringing knowledge-first AI to industrial leaders whose accumulated process expertise, operating discipline, and factory data define sovereignty in practice.

Nanda Kishore

Co-Founder & COO · Aitomatic (US)

Co-founder and chief operating officer at Aitomatic, scaling industrial-AI products and customer deployments. Previously EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Arimo, CTO of ShareThis, founder and CEO of TheFind, and a general manager at Amazon.

Vinh Luong

Head of Product & AI Engineering · Aitomatic (US)

Leads product and AI engineering at Aitomatic and heads its open-source program — SemiKong, the first open-source semiconductor-industry LLM built with Tokyo Electron, FPT Software, and the AI Alliance, and the Dana agent-native language.

Young-Sup Joo

Distinguished Professor · SNU Graduate School of Engineering Practice

Former Minister of Korea’s SMB Administration & a career industrialist — CEO of Hyundai Autonet & GE Sensing APAC — Chairman of KICON & the NST Convergence Research Committee, bridging Korea’s manufacturing, venture, & R&D ecosystem.

Akihiko Inoue

Digital & AI Technology Center · Panasonic

Leads Panasonic’s Digital & AI Technology Center and North American R&D operations, after building the UniPhier integration platform, LUMIX image-recognition systems, and Panasonic’s AI Solution Strategy.

Mitch Tsuda

Chief Architect, Open Data Spaces · IPA / METI

Chief Architect of Japan’s Open Data Spaces, the national framework for cross-industry data sharing under METI’s Ouranos Ecosystem. Estonia-trained with prior roles at Mitsubishi Corporation and BCG, he is shaping how Japanese industry connects data across sectors for the AI era.

Yen Vu

Yen Vu

CEO · Be Group

CEO of Be Group, Vietnam's super app for ride-hailing, delivery, food, and home services. She led the platform through a scale-up, took the company to profitability, and secured US$100M financing with Deutsche Bank. Previously she led a nationwide health-tech rollout for Vietnam's largest private hospital group and turned around Adayroi.com.

·

To be announced

Minister · Government

Cabinet-level official shaping national policy on compute, capacity, and industrial strategy.

Full speaker roster published upon confirmation. Register now to join us.

The Moment

The capital is moving. Now.

Sovereign AI has crossed from op-ed into budget line. Nations, blocs, and firms are racing to own the intelligence that will run their industries — and 2026 is the year the money lands.

21+

Jurisdictions building sovereign AI.

From India’s IndiaAI Mission and BharatGen, to the UAE’s state-backed AI strategy, to France and the EU’s push behind Mistral and sovereign cloud, governments are funding domestic models, compute, and data governance rather than renting their future from foreign providers.

¥2.35T

Japan’s industrial-AI bet.

Japan has committed roughly ¥2.35 trillion ($16B) to Rapidus for 2nm mass production by 2027, in partnership with IBM — the host nation’s bid to reclaim the fab as sovereign territory, alongside national AI programs across Japanese industry.

$975B

The semiconductor foundation.

Global semiconductor revenue hits a historic peak in 2026, AI chips now driving roughly half of it — the physical layer beneath every sovereign AI ambition, from the US CHIPS Act to the EU Chips Act 2.0 to Rapidus.

The firms and nations that move first will own the intelligence layer of the next industrial era. Make your move in Tokyo this October.

The Theme

Industrial AI sovereignty.

Industrial AI is the intelligence that runs a fab, a grid, a supply chain, a factory line. It lives in process recipes honed over decades, in the heads of retiring engineers, in the defect-class logs of every wafer ever inspected. Sovereignty over that intelligence — owning it, on your own terms — is the question of the decade.

Industrial AI sovereignty — the why, the what, the how

Why

Because the firms that own the intelligence layer of their factories will own the next industrial era. Those that lease it back from a vendor-held cloud will pay forever, at a price that only goes one way. Sovereignty is not a slogan — it is the difference between making what you design and merely designing it.

What

Industrial AI is the intelligence running the fab, the grid, the line — yield optimization, predictive uptime, first-time-fix, the captured know-how of senior engineers. Sovereignty means owning the models, the data, and the deployment: on-prem, trained on your process, controlled by you.

How

Neurosymbolic models that reason like your experts. A shared sovereign frontier — Project Tapestry — that nations and institutions build on, then own. Knowledge-first architectures like DanaOS and the Cognitive Ontology, deployed inside your firewall, learning your craft and keeping it yours.

What industrial AI looks like on the ground

Fab yield & defect

Models that read wafer-inspection logs and process recipes to lift yield and catch defect classes humans miss — without leaking the recipe to a vendor.

First-time-fix rate

Field engineers guided by agents trained on decades of service tickets — closing the gap when the senior technician retires and takes the know-how with them.

Predictive uptime

Sensor-driven forecasts that schedule maintenance before a $200M tool goes down — owned by the operator, not rented from a cloud API.

Expert knowledge captured

The unwritten rules of the line — encoded into a neurosymbolic model your firm owns outright, so the next generation inherits the craft instead of rediscovering it.

Tokyo cityscape at golden hour with Mount Fuji rising behind it — the industrial capital of the world.
The Stakes

A century ago this city taught the world that precision is a form of prestige. In October the question is sharper: when the global giants of the $25 trillion industrial economy walk into the same room, who owns the intelligence they leave with?

Tokyo October 13, 2026

The Anchor · Project Tapestry

One shared frontier model. Many sovereign systems.

This year’s theme is anchored by Project Tapestry — the AI Alliance’s open consortium for co-training a shared frontier model, from which nations and institutions build sovereign systems they own and control.

Tapestry is the through-line of the program: the technical substrate beneath national capacity, the cultural values embedded in the weights, and the industrial data that shapes them. Few subjects are more urgent, or more global, today.

Convened with the AI Alliance — the world’s largest open AI consortium.
The Conveners

Program committee & host.

A curated program is only as strong as the committee that shapes it. This year’s committee draws from the semiconductor, systems, and research institutions building sovereign industrial AI — anchored in Project Tapestry.

General Chair · IIAC 2026

Christopher Nguyen CEO · Aitomatic · AI Alliance Board Member · Chief Architect of Project Tapestry

Program Chair

Anthony J. Annunziata Director of AI Open Innovation · IBM · Co-founder & Co-chair, the AI Alliance

Program Committee

Anthony J. Annunziata IBM · AI Alliance · Tapestry
Teruhide Sato BEENEXT · Founder & CEO Industrial AI portfolio: SixSense · Haberwater
Charles Kawashima Renesas · AI and Information Systems
Da-Shan Shiu MediaTek
Ganesh Ramakrishnan IIT Bombay · BharatGen · Tapestry
Hung Bui Qualcomm
Nanda Kishore Aitomatic (US)
Thuc Vu Nvidia
Yoshikuni Hirayama Aitomatic (JP)

Conference Organizers

Alexandra N. Nguyen
Alexandra N. Nguyen
Anh Hai Ha
Anh Hai Ha
Nanda Kishore
Nanda Kishore
Yoshikuni Hirayama
Yoshikuni Hirayama
I. Stanford 2021 II. Stanford 2022 III. Stanford 2023 IV. Stanford 2024 Ha Noi 2025 V. Tokyo 2026
IAF Industrial AI Federation

The Federation has convened annually since 2021 — Stanford through 2024, Ha Noi in 2025 — bringing government, industry, and academia into the same room on the future of industrial intelligence. The fifth edition of IIAC comes to Tokyo, convened with the AI Alliance around Project Tapestry.

The Federation

Eight organizations. One frontier.

The Industrial AI Federation is a global coalition of the companies and institutions building industrial AI in production — from the fabs and factories to the banks that finance them and the universities that train their engineers.

Panasonic
IBM
Aitomatic
Honeywell
RHI Magnesita
VPBank
AI Alliance
HKUST
The Place

Tokyo.

The industrial capital of the world. Precise venue and accommodation guidance is provided after registration.

A city that has spent a century proving that prestige and precision are the same word.

The fifth edition comes to Tokyo — to the source of the industrial discipline this conference is about. Sessions, meals, and the closing reception will be held in central Tokyo; the precise venue is shared with registered attendees.

Attendance

Register now.

Early Bird rates below end September 1, 2026. Registration includes travel guidance and the venue address.

Early Bird Rates below end September 1, 2026 · regular pricing applies after.
Industry · Professional
$895 USD

Regular $995

Full-day plenary, hosted luncheon, and reception. For practicing engineers, technical leads, and industry attendees.

Academic & Government
$395 USD

Regular $495

Subsidized rate for verified faculty, researchers, and government officials. Limited places.

Emerging Markets
$295 USD

Regular $395

For verified attendees from low- and middle-income economies — so the global sovereign-AI conversation is actually global. Eligibility by billing address or institutional email.

Refunds are subject to an 8% platform fee. Cancellations before September 1, 2026 are refunded in full less the fee; 50% through September 22; non-refundable thereafter. Registrations may be transferred to a qualified colleague at any time. Attendance is capped to preserve the character of the room. If your firm is sending more than two attendees, please request a sponsorship.