Four hundred thousand robots is the scale Toyota is weighing for its own supply chain. To widen automation across its plants, group companies and major suppliers, the automaker has floated roughly $6.4B in annual spending from 2028, a figure discussed with investors earlier in September and reported by Reuters.
The count mixes replacements of machines already running with fresh installations, covering humanoid and non-humanoid hardware, industrial robots, automated logistics and future human-robot collaboration on the floor. No decision has been made on whether the full program proceeds or how many years spending at that level would last.
Automation already runs in places. A piston assembly line at the Kamigo plant, staffed by three operators when robots first arrived there in January 2025, now runs unattended; trials on selected sub-lines at that plant stretch back to 2008. Capacity pushed overseas later stalled, because some sites could not find maintenance workers skilled enough to keep the equipment alive, and certain processes went back to manual work. Employees who built their own jigs and tools doubled or tripled efficiency in places, and that accumulated know-how fed the automation that followed.
Newer systems no longer need parts arranged precisely in advance. One example is KumiPro, a parts-picking robot. Its cameras identify components that sit loosely in a bin rather than in fixed positions, and it already works a production line at Toyota Motor East Japan. In a demonstrated assembly step, feedback on force corrects what the cameras misread, so the robot can steer a part into a narrow gap. Toyota places this work under the label physical AI.
