IBM is prioritizing helping Japan’s chipmaking startup Rapidus, with a senior executive describing the budding foundry business as vital to securing long-term global supply.
Rapidus, a venture backed by some of Japan’s biggest electronics firms, is turning IBM’s 2-nanometer chip design into production-ready silicon and aims to fabricate such chips at scale in the latter half of this decade. The most advanced semiconductors today are built at the larger 3 nm node.
"When it comes to 2 nm technology, we are focusing our efforts on Rapidus and investing a great deal of resources to this project, even sacrificing some capacity that we could have used in other research,” said IBM Japan’s Chief Technology Officer Norishige Morimoto. "We want Rapidus to succeed. We want it to contribute to a stable supply of the chips we and the world need.”