Toyota subsidiary NEXTY Electronics is to distribute industrial AI and edge computing products and services from US AI specialist Blaize. NEXTY will market and distribute Blaize technology to industrial manufacturing and automotive sectors in Japan.

Part of Toyota’s Tsusho Group, a business group that commercialises Toyota’s technology and manufacturing know-how, NEXTY develops, manufactures and markets car electronics and smart manufacturing and industrial technology.

“We are pleased to leverage our partnership with Blaize to provide cutting-edge solutions to a wide range of NEXTY Electronics’ customers.” said Kiyotaka Nakao, Managing Director of NEXTY Electronics. “Edge AI computing technology is evolving rapidly and is sure to become more and more important to the semiconductor industry’s business. We hope that combining NEXTY Electronics’ abundant knowledge of semiconductor peripheral technology with Blaize products and will open up many business opportunities.”

“We are excited to work with NEXTY realising benefits from their strength in delivering systems that enable customers to innovate with AI,” said Richard Terrill, VP Strategic Business Development, Blaize. “Their focus on innovation and anticipating customer needs across multiple industries is well aligned with the requirements to drive adoption of edge AI applications enabled by Blaize low power, low latency and compute efficient AI inference accelerator offering.”

The Blaize Pathfinder SOM and Xplorer AI accelerators together with Blaize AI Studio and Blaize Picasso SDK are designed to enable edge AI products across a wide range of edge use cases and industries. The industrial-grade Pathfinder P1600 SOM is suitable for development and field trials, with a roadmap of automotive products coming online to serve model years 2023 and beyond. Blaize software and hardware is designed to deliver end-to-end efficient and usable AI edge workflow.