Hitachi launches new platform and operations management solutions, including HMAX Data Fabric

TOKYO, September 8, 2026 - (JCN Newswire) - Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501, "Hitachi"), today launched foundry solutions supporting “HMAX by Hitachi” (“HMAX”), a next-generation suite of solutions that brings the power of AI to social infrastructure. They are the “Physical AI FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) Service,” in which the “Physical AI FDE Team,” an expert team connecting IT and OT(Operational Technology) through AI, is embedded at customer sites; “HMAX Data Fabric,” a data platform that integrates tacit frontline knowledge and data; and “HMAX AI Operations,” which supports safe autonomous operations. With these new offerings, Hitachi aims to enable autonomous optimization across entire frontline operations and eliminate organizational and system silos in social infrastructure and industrial fields.

By seamlessly linking these solutions, Hitachi will accumulate tacit knowledge and data as digital assets and circulate them across the organization for use, thereby providing end-to-end support ranging from the identification of management challenges to AI development and operations.

As its approach to frontline operations, Hitachi’s Physical AI FDE Team brings together diverse experts with world-leading AI capabilities and deep domain expertise cultivated through more than 110 years of manufacturing experience and infrastructure development and operations. The team works side by side with customers, starting with the identification of business challenges and supporting their transformation journey. In addition, the team performs high-quality cleansing and structuring of diverse and heterogeneous frontline data, while capturing the experience, know-how, and decision-making criteria of skilled workers that have traditionally remained undocumented.

This frontline data and tacit knowledge are systematically contextualized based on an ontology*1 and accumulated in HMAX Data Fabric as knowledge graphs*2 that AI can utilize. The platform also connects with environments for training AI models that control robots and other equipment using the accumulated data, as well as environments for developing and operating Agentic AI, providing AI-ready data.

Furthermore, by linking this data and these AI models with IWIM (Integrated World Infrastructure Model)*3, Hitachi’s social infrastructure intelligence foundation model, AI will be able to accurately interpret contexts such as physical operational limits and frontline control rules. This enables advanced orchestration in which AI balances operations across different systems and optimizes operations across the entire frontline while considering complex constraints such as utilization rates and power consumption. Additionally, HMAX AI Operations continuously monitors and reduces AI-specific risks and hallucinations, supporting safe autonomous operations even in mission-critical environments.

By integrating these advanced digital platforms with expert support and connecting the extracted frontline knowledge to AI utilization and operation, Hitachi will enable rapid AI implementation tailored to each customer’s unique data environment and frontline rules, while ensuring high adaptability to environmental changes. Through enhanced decision-making by management, accelerated enterprise-wide AI adoption led by digital transformation teams, Hitachi will contribute to the continuous evolution of companies and entire industries.

*1 Ontology: A systematic definition of the meanings and concepts of data, as well as the relationships among them. Today, it is also being redefined as a common language that connects enterprise data platforms and AI agents.
*2 Knowledge graph: A database structured by connecting diverse data and their relationships in a network, or graphstructure, based on ontology. It serves as a foundation that enables AI to trace connections among pieces of information and conduct advanced contextual understanding and reasoning toward overall optimization.
*3 An intelligence foundation model announced by Hitachi in November 2025. It was developed based on Hitachi’s multilayered OT knowledge accumulated over many years, as well as its deep understanding of physical phenomena, to safely and reliably implement Physical AI in mission-critical social infrastructure

Background

Mission-critical frontline operations in social infrastructure and industrial fields, including energy, railways and manufacturing, have faced increasingly serious challenges in recent years due to labor shortages and the loss of tacit frontline knowledge as skilled engineers retire. While expectations are growing for the social implementation of Physical AI as a means of addressing these challenges, simply introducing AI models is not enough in actual frontline environments. It is essential to properly prepare noisy frontline data, convert site-specific constraints and safety rules into forms that AI can handle, and continuously monitor data quality, AI model performance, security and other factors after implementation to ensure safe, railways and manufacturing, have faced increasingly serious challenges ongoing operations.

Through its Lumada business, Hitachi has built a strong track record of delivering mission-critical systems, operations, and data-driven solutions in collaboration with customers and partners. Hitachi’s unique expertise in systematizing frontline knowledge as ontologies and making it reusable across industries, together with its strong capabilities in secure system governance, underpins HMAX Data Fabric as a key strength. Building on this long-standing track record and deep OT expertise, Hitachi is strengthening collaboration with the global AI ecosystem to further accelerate autonomous operations across frontline environments through HMAX. As part of these efforts, Hitachi announced the development of multi-agent orchestration technology using NVIDIA technology in July 2026*4.

*4 Hitachi press release issued on July 16, 2026. Hitachi and NVIDIA collaborate to advance HMAX and enable end-to-end autonomous operations through the integrated control of physical AI

Comment from Yoshitomo Hosoya, Vice President and Executive Officer, CEO of the AI & Software Services Business Unit, Hitachi, Ltd.

“To maximize the value of AI in mission-critical environments such as social infrastructure, it is essential to convert frontline-specific tacit knowledge into a form that AI can interpret and to establish mechanisms to safely utilize and operate it on an ongoing basis. These new solutions build on Hitachi’s extensive track record in supporting approximately 15,000 mission-critical coresystems in collaboration with customers and partners, as well as its expertise in the platform software that supports them. They are also grounded in expertise cultivated over many years in integrating and contextualizing distributed frontline data to support advanced analysis and decision-making across areas such as railway operations management, power transmission and distribution, and manufacturing production and maintenance. In addition, by leveraging advanced AI technologies developed through collaboration with global partners, combined with the hands-on support of our Physical AI FDE Team, we will help customers optimize their frontline operations and achieve sustainable growth.”

For more information, please visit:
https://www.hitachi.com/content/dam/hitachi/global/en/press/files/2026/09/260903d.pdf