Manufacturing
Foxconn Develops Physical AI-Enabled Smart Factories With Digital Twins
Objective
Foxconn (Hon Hai Technology Group), the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, is redefining how the world’s most advanced products are built for the industrial digital revolution. The company uses physically accurate digital twins powered by NVIDIA Omniverse™ and Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) to design, deploy, and manage complex, high-volume production facilities—including those producing NVIDIA GB200 Grace™ Blackwell Superchip systems. Foxconn’s Fii Omniverse Digital Twin (FODT) platform utilizes NVIDIA Omniverse to create comprehensive virtual replicas of its factories. This enables simulation-driven design, real-time monitoring, and optimized operations across the company’s worldwide footprint.
With Omniverse, Foxconn drives industrial transformation, including:
- 150x faster computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for thermal analysis using NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo AI models (minutes vs. hours).
- Rapid migration of entire production lines between global factories, enabled by standardized Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) based digital twin assets.
- Enhanced robot operations through simulation-driven design and evaluation in Isaac Sim before physical deployment.
- Optimized Dynamic AGV path by connecting simulations with Material Control Systems and NVIDIA cuOpt™.
- Improved operational visibility through digital twin monitoring real-time production KPIs, enabling faster responses to potential issues.
Bridging Physical and Virtual Worlds for Improved Factory Planning
Modern electronics manufacturing faces unprecedented complexity. Setting up, optimizing, and managing large-scale production lines across multiple global sites requires significant time and resources.
Traditional methods for factory design, layout evaluation, robot programming, logistics planning, and environmental analysis can be slow, siloed, and computationally expensive. They limit a manufacturer’s ability to perform real-time analysis, dynamically optimize operations, or replicate best practices across facilities.
Foxconn needed a unified platform to bridge the physical and virtual worlds, allowing them to precisely simulate how new factory designs would perform. They sought a solution to power faster iteration, better collaboration, and data-driven decision-making throughout the factory lifecycle.
“If you think about time to revenue, factory setup, and factory planning, we believe that we can cut that down by about 50%. We can model everything in a virtual environment to make sure everything fits and there are no obstructions, and then we can deploy our equipment.”
Leo Guo
General Manager of Fii Robotic Group
Foxconn
Foxconn
Virtual Factories Deliver Actionable Insights
The FODT platform is transforming how Foxconn designs and operates its factories. FODT leverages NVIDIA Omniverse platform technologies for building and operating digital twins of Foxconn’s smart factories and delivering real-world intelligence and outcomes. The FODT platform connects virtual factories to real-world operational data, embedding dashboards with key metrics from manufacturing execution systems (MES), shop floor control (SFC), and automation systems.
Accelerated Factory Deployment
Entire production lines are virtually assembled using FODT and standardized USD assets, allowing Foxconn to rapidly migrate and duplicate layouts between global sites (e.g., Taiwan to Mexico). New factory bring-up and scaling are speeding up significantly as a result.
Simulating Factory-Level Airflow
NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo has drastically reduced simulation time, enabling CFD simulations up to 150X faster than traditional methods. Thermal insights are delivered in minutes instead of hours, facilitating real-time decision-making across factory operations.
Foxconn integrates NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo, a framework for physics-informed machine learning, with Omniverse. By training AI models on data from traditional CFD solvers (e.g., Cadence), Foxconn can perform near real-time thermal simulations (e.g., for data center POD cooling) directly within the digital twin, drastically reducing computation time from hours to minutes.
Optimized Automation and Robotics
Robot workcells and Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) logistics are simulated in the FODT platform, allowing Foxconn to design safer and more efficient layouts and operations before capital investment in physical hardware is made.
Complex robotic tasks like screw tightening and cable insertion are simulated and refined with Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, FoundationPose models, and cuMotion™ for collision-free motion planning.
Foxconn is also exploring integrating humanoid robots into its operations, using NVIDIA Isaac GR00T for development and adopting the Mega NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint to test and simulate robot fleets at scale before deployment.
Actionable Operational Insights
Powered by NVIDIA Metropolis, Foxconn also built video analytics AI agents with the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization to monitor the factory floor. The AI agent analyzes video footage to provide insights for various scenarios—for example, detecting unauthorized entry into restricted areas. Users can interact with the video through a chat interface or automatically generate reports that are required by management based on the analysis results.
Managers can also explore production lines immersively while monitoring performance and resolving issues instantly.
AI Models for Intelligent Factories
Foxconn is advancing its vision of intelligent factories by developing FoxBrain, an AI platform powered by NVIDIA NeMo. Trained in just four weeks, FoxBrain is optimized for traditional Chinese, making it Taiwan's first large language model with advanced reasoning capabilities. Initially designed for use in their own factories, FoxBrain enhances data analysis, decision-making, and automation across Foxconn's smart manufacturing, smart city, and electric vehicle platforms. The model's efficient training strategy, focusing on optimized resource utilization, has led to significant improvements in simulation times, resource optimization, and manufacturing processes.
Foxconn
Next-Generation Smart Factories Powered by Digital Twins
Foxconn's Fii Omniverse Digital Twin (FODT) platform is transforming factory design and operations.
The standardized USD asset libraries and FODT methodology have accelerated factory deployment by allowing rapid migration and duplication of production lines between global sites. This has significantly reduced the time required for new factory launches and scaling processes.
Digital twin capabilities provide immersive, intuitive monitoring of real-time production KPIs. Operational visibility has improved, and responses to issues throughout the manufacturing process are faster.
These technologies and methodologies form the foundation for Foxconn's smart factories. The integration of digital twins, AI, and simulation technologies supports advanced plant modeling, simulation, planning, and operations management, positioning Foxconn at the forefront of manufacturing innovation.
Discover how NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA AI platform technologies can help you build your own industrial digital twins and transform your operations.