Hitachi Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. announced a projected multibillion-dollar collaboration over the next three years that will accelerate social innovation with generative AI. Through this strategic alliance, Hitachi will propel growth of the Lumada business, with a planned revenue of 2.65 trillion yen (18.9 billion USD)*1 in FY2024, and will promote operational efficiency and productivity improvements for Hitachi Group’s 270,000 employees.
Specifically, Hitachi will embed the Microsoft cloud, Azure Open AI Service, Dynamics 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot into Lumada solutions to provide innovative solutions for the energy, mobility and other industries to deliver better outcomes for businesses and society.
In addition, the two companies will promote joint projects to address pressing business needs such as bolstering cloud services, enhancing security, and mitigating the environmental footprint of data centers, which have become an increasing area of focus with the growing use of generative AI.
“Hitachi has been driving transformation by applying AI across the Hitachi Group to improve productivity and will invest 300 billion yen（2.1 billion USD)*1 in GenAI to capture new growth opportunities in FY2024. Hitachi and Microsoft have already been working on a variety of co-creation projects including the development of next-generation digital solutions for the manufacturing and logistics fields*2 and the development of a field-extended metaverse that runs on Microsoft Teams,” said Keiji Kojima, president and CEO of Hitachi. “Under this new agreement, we are excited to further accelerate social innovation by expanding our efforts to social infrastructure areas such as energy and mobility, and by applying generative AI, to improve the productivity of frontline workers, which will become even more important in the future. By combining our capabilities, we can help solve the issues faced by our customers and society, and contribute to a more sustainable future.”
“We are entering a new era of AI with the promise to deliver transformative business outcomes across every role and industry,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership with Hitachi will bring together the power of the Microsoft Cloud — including Microsoft Copilot — with Hitachi’s industry expertise to improve the productivity of 270,000 Hitachi employees and help address customers’ biggest challenges, including sustainability.”
