Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia-what’s going on in there?

Toyota covered my flight from Albany to Tokyo and my stay so I could walk the streets of Woven City. The visit was arranged by the company, but the reporting remains editorially independent.

Back in 2020 at the Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda announced a city of the future where researchers, engineers and scientists would live and work side by side. The promise was framed as a turning point for the world’s biggest car maker, shifting its identity toward a full‑stack mobility firm.

Six months ago the company finished building the urban pocket on the site of an old factory, investing roughly $10 billion. The mini‑metropolis is packed with sensors and connectivity, designed to collect data continuously as people go about their day.

The first wave of residents, called “Weavers,” totals about one hundred people hand‑picked to boost the project’s tech credibility. Their role is to interact with the environment, generate real‑world use cases and help refine the platform’s AI systems.

Walking around, I saw autonomous shuttles navigating alleyways, drones delivering supplies, and public spaces that adjust lighting based on occupancy. All of these elements feed into a massive data stream that Toyota plans to use for training and testing AI models.

For anyone building AI tools, Woven City offers a living lab where algorithms can be evaluated at scale in a controlled yet real environment. The sensor‑rich setting could accelerate development of perception, routing and human‑machine interaction technologies.

The project reflects a broader trend of corporations creating private urban labs to fast‑track innovation. As more companies experiment with their own test cities, the line between public infrastructure and corporate research will continue to blur, reshaping how AI is deployed in everyday life.