第五回 · Tokyo · October 8, 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 By invitation 東京 Tokyo

Hosted by the Industrial AI Federation · 産業AI連合

IIAC

International Industrial AI Conference

Fifth Annual · Tokyo · October 8

The Invitation

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; FPT and the policy leads of the ministries and parliament; and the venture capitalists who fund them all. Attendance is limited to preserve the conversation.

此刻 · 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.

産業AIの主権 · 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.
産業の首都 · 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 8, 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.
プログラム · The Program · One Day

October 8, 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.

A curated program. Below, our keynote speakers and the committee whose networks shape the rest of the day. Around them, 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.

Keynote speakers

Keynote

Christopher Nguyen

CEO & Co-Founder, Aitomatic Chief Architect, 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

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.

Keynote

Hiroshi Kutsumi

Managing Executive Officer & CTO · Panasonic Holdings

Chief Technology Officer of Panasonic Holdings and head of the Digital & AI Technology Center, the corporate engine applying AI across batteries, appliances, factories, supply chains, and responsible industrial deployment.

Program committee & guests

Anthony Annunziata

AI Open Innovation, IBM Program Chair

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

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

IIT Bombay Founder, BharatGen

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

Senior Director of 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

Nvidia Co-founder, OhmniLabs

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

GM · 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.

Tomoki Nagai

GM, Materials Informatics · JSR

Materials-science veteran driving JSR’s Materials Informatics Initiative, applying machine learning with the Institute of Statistical Mathematics to discover the photoresists and polymers behind advanced semiconductor patterning.

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

COO, Aitomatic (US)

Chief operating officer at Aitomatic and core architect of DanaOS and the Cognitive Ontology, the operating system and knowledge layer anchoring Project Tapestry’s industrial frontier.

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.

·

To be announced

Minister · Government

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

Full speaker roster published upon confirmation. Request an invitation to be notified.

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, Project Tapestry

Program Chair

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

Program Committee

Anthony Annunziata IBM · AI Alliance · Tapestry
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)
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.

産業AI連合 · 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
開催地 · The Place

Tokyo. 東京

The industrial capital of the world. Precise venue and accommodations announced with confirmations.

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 confirmed invitations.

参加 · Attendance

Request an invitation.

IIAC is by invitation. Approved requests are confirmed within five business days, with travel guidance and the venue address. Early-bird rates below end August 8, 2026.

Early bird Rates below end August 8, 2026 · regular pricing applies after.
Industry · Professional
$795 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.

Cancellations refunded in full before September 1, 2026; 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 one attendee, please request a sponsorship.