Rapidus is considering building its first chip factory on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. That reports TV Tokyo. Rapidus was set up at the end of last year by various tech companies and wants to produce 2nm chips in the future. The company is working together with imec and IBM, among others.
Rapidus may already be making a decision at the end of this month about the location of its first chip factory, writes Reuters. The factory would probably be located on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. The city of Chitose is mentioned as one of the possible locations. That place has about 100,000 inhabitants and is located in the southwest of the island, below the capital Sapporo. A spokesman for Rapidus says the governor of Hokkaido will visit the manufacturer’s headquarters on Thursday, but no concrete decision has yet been made. There would also have been no preliminary talks with the local government.
Rapidus was founded at the end of last year by several major Japanese tech groups, including Sony, NEC, Toyota and Kioxia. At the head is Tetsuro Higashi, former chairman of chip machine maker Tokyo Electron. Rapidus plans to produce advanced chips for other companies later this decade. This means that it will fully function as an ‘external foundry’, as TSMC also does. The company is working with the US for this and previously announced collaborations with Belgian imec and the American IBM, both of which will assist the manufacturer in making 2nm chips.
The Japanese government will initially invest 70 billion yen, which amounts to approximately 483 million euros. The company must help Japan become less dependent on chip manufacturers outside the country, because there are mounting geopolitical tensions worldwide. Rapidus said to Reuters earlier this month that the company will need about $49 billion to mass-produce advanced logic chips by 2027. The bulk of that money should come from public funding.
