Japan backs Rapidus with $4B

Japan approved another 631.5 billion yen, or about $4 billion, for Rapidus on April 11, pushing total government research and development support for the chipmaker to 2.354 trillion yen. The money is aimed at getting Rapidus from a pilot line to mass production of leading-edge chips in 2027. (reuters.com) Rapidus is not an old industrial giant. It was launched in 2022 as a state-backed venture to rebuild Japan’s ability to make the most advanced logic chips, the kind used to run artificial intelligence systems, cloud data centers, and high-end servers. (rapidus.inc) Japan used to dominate memory chips and chip materials, but the global center of advanced logic manufacturing shifted to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in Taiwan and Samsung Electronics in South Korea. Rapidus is Japan’s attempt to get back into the part of the business where the smallest manufacturing mistakes can ruin a wafer worth millions of dollars. (reuters.com) The target is “2 nanometer” chips, which is industry shorthand for a new generation of semiconductors that pack more computing power into less space while cutting electricity use. In plain terms, they are the chips companies want when they need more artificial intelligence performance without a power bill that explodes. (rapidus.inc) Rapidus is building those chips at its IIM-1 plant in Chitose, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The company says the pilot line started operating in April 2025, and mass production is still scheduled for 2027. (rapidus.inc, rapidus.inc) This is not a solo Japanese effort. Rapidus is using 2 nanometer process technology developed with International Business Machines, and the two companies expanded their partnership in June 2024 to include chiplet packaging, which is the method of connecting smaller chip blocks into one faster package. (ibm.com) The factory itself depends on extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is the machine that draws impossibly tiny circuit patterns with light. Rapidus says an extreme ultraviolet tool from ASML, the Dutch company that effectively monopolizes this equipment, was installed at IIM-1 in December 2024. (rapidus.inc) Rapidus has been moving from plans to hardware. In July 2025, the company said it had started prototyping 2 nanometer gate-all-around transistors at IIM-1, which is the transistor design the industry is using because older designs leak too much power at these tiny scales. (rapidus.inc) Japan is not just writing checks to one startup. Reuters reported that the same April 11 announcement also included support through the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization for chip design-related projects at Fujitsu and IBM Japan, which shows Tokyo is trying to fund the whole stack from design to manufacturing. (reuters.com) That is why this number is so large. A leading-edge chip fab needs hundreds of specialized tools, years of process tuning, and customers willing to trust a new manufacturer, so Japan is treating advanced semiconductor capacity less like a normal startup bet and more like an airport or power grid that the country does not want to import forever. (rapidus.inc, reuters.com)