Hitachi will launch a new global digital services company, Hitachi Digital, on April 1, 2027, uniting its United States subsidiaries GlobalLogic and Hitachi Digital Services under a single brand. Announced on October 28, the new company will employ approximately 35,000 professionals across 27 countries and serve more than 880 active clients, with a remit that runs from enterprise AI to physical AI in manufacturing, mobility and energy. The move follows an integration plan first announced in January 2026, and a brand campaign for the new company launches today.
Two Companies, One Brand
GlobalLogic brings digital engineering strength: product and software engineering, research and development services, and experience building connected products and intelligent operations. Hitachi Digital Services brings enterprise and operational expertise, including work connecting edge intelligence, robotics and AI-driven decision layers into secure, mission-critical environments. Hitachi says combining them creates a single partner that can engineer what is new, modernise what sits underneath, and keep the whole system running.
“Our clients need one partner who understands how an industry works, maintains deep technology ecosystem relationships, while engineering what’s new, modernising what’s underneath and keeping it all running across the enterprise,” said Anand Birje, chief executive and chairman of Hitachi Digital. “Hitachi Digital brings digital engineering and operations together as one company, at global scale, with the industrial depth of Hitachi behind us.”
What Hitachi Digital Will Actually Do
The company’s service lines read like a map of where AI is now being sold to industry. They include Physical AI, which covers robots and automated equipment working in the real world; Data and Intelligence, which turns operational data into decisions; Cloud and Site Reliability Engineering, which keeps complex systems running; and Enterprise Applications, which modernises the core software businesses run on.
Hitachi Digital will also push HMAX by Hitachi, a suite that brings AI to social infrastructure, and Lumada 3.0, Hitachi’s platform for co-creating innovation with clients.
Central to the model are Hitachi Digital’s Forward Deployed Engineers, teams of AI specialists, data scientists and engineers who work directly inside clients’ operational environments. Rather than handing over a system and leaving, these teams apply new AI and digital capabilities alongside clients and technology partners, in factories, energy plants and transport networks where a failed deployment has real-world consequences.
Physical AI Is The Differentiator
What sets Hitachi Digital apart, the company argues, is Hitachi’s long-standing operational technology knowledge. Hitachi has spent decades building and operating industrial equipment, and that domain knowledge is hard for a pure software consultancy to replicate. The company says it will accelerate both enterprise AI and physical AI across manufacturing, mobility and energy, and across the Hitachi Group itself through “customer zero” initiatives, where Hitachi’s own businesses adopt the technology first.
There is early evidence of traction. Hitachi Digital’s synergy revenue with the Hitachi Group grew 46 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year, suggesting that group companies are already buying more of this work.
A Bet On Scale And Industrial Depth
With 35,000 professionals and more than 880 clients, Hitachi Digital enters the market as a large player in a field where many AI services firms are still small and specialised. Hitachi says it will continue to invest in AI, data and cloud talent, along with expanded alliances and acquisitions.
Jun Abe, Hitachi’s executive vice president and head of its Digital Systems and Services sector, framed the move as an evolution of the whole group. “With the launch of Hitachi Digital, Hitachi will evolve into a global digital services company capable of providing end-to-end solutions ranging from enterprise AI to Physical AI,” he said. “By uniting GlobalLogic’s digital engineering with Hitachi Digital Services’ enterprise and operational expertise, we will work alongside clients throughout their business transformation.”
Why It Matters
This matters because the AI services market is splitting into two kinds of company: those that can demo a model, and those that can deploy it inside a factory, a power grid or a railway without breaking anything. Hitachi is betting that the second kind wins the larger contracts, and that its industrial heritage is the moat. The Forward Deployed Engineer model is the mechanism: engineers who live with the client’s operations, rather than consultants who visit them.
It also matters as a consolidation signal. As AI moves from pilots to production, clients are asking fewer vendors to do more, and vendors are merging to cover the full journey from strategy to operations. Hitachi Digital is one of the largest such combinations announced this year, and its success or failure will be watched by rivals weighing similar mergers. The same pressure to turn AI into measurable outcomes is visible across the sector, as in Dayforce’s agentic platform for the whole workforce, Tractian’s physical AI for factories and NetBox and NEYON’s single source of truth for AI factories, where the pitch is no longer the model itself but the result it delivers inside a real operation.
Background
Hitachi, Ltd. operates across digital systems and services, energy, mobility and connective industries, with revenues of 10,586.7 billion yen in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026. The creation of Hitachi Digital, under its “Inspire 2027” management plan, is the group’s attempt to turn that industrial breadth into a single digital services business, with the formal launch set for April 1, 2027.
Source: Hitachi announcement
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