Fujitsu At The Core Of Japan's AI Independence Drive

The Fujitsu-Monaka CPU is an Arm-based processor developed for use in data centers and Japan's FugakuNEXT supercomputer. Now fabricated by TSMC using a 2-nm process, it will be produced by Rapidus when its first fab comes online in 2027. Both devices, the NPU and the CPU, are designed to maximize energy efficiency and reduce the power consumption of AI data centers.

In March, Fujitsu started manufacturing AI servers at its Kasashima factory in Ishikawa Prefecture to support government-designated critical industries including energy, telecommunications, logistics, healthcare, aerospace and defense. These servers are equipped with Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and Fujitsu-Monaka CPUs.

Production at Kasashima will be facilitated by Fujitsu's collaboration with California-based IT solutions provider Supermicro, which contributes its development, manufacturing, sales and maintenance expertise. The AI servers will be sold in Europe as well as Japan, a reminder of the strategic ties between the two.

Arm is a British integrated circuit design company owned by Japan's Softbank Group. Fujitsu-Monaka was developed with the support of NEDO. Rapidus and IBM announced a strategic partnership in December 2022. IBM and Fujitsu are both shareholders in Rapidus.

Earlier this year, it was reported that IBM has developed a new and vastly more efficient heat-modeling technique with electronic design automation (EDA) company Synopsis and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that will facilitate production at 2-nm and“be a direct requirement for performance at 1.4-nm,” according to Russ Robison, a senior data analysis engineer at IBM Research. As circuit features shrink, heat management becomes a critical issue.

To speed up heat calculations at ever-smaller process nodes, IBM and Ansys, a subsidiary of Synopsis, developed a new machine learning tool with support from DARPA. Ansys, which was acquired by Synopsis in July 2025, specializes in engineering simulation software. IBM can be expected to share this technology with Rapidus.

Last December, Fujitsu and Riken decided to invest and participate in the efforts of Saimemory, a subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, to develop a more efficient alternative to the high-bandwidth memory used with the GPUs designed by Nvidia and its nearest competitor, AMD.

Riken (literally the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) is Japan's leading scientific research institute. SoftBank Corp is part of the SoftBank Group. Taiwanese IC foundry Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC ), Japanese semiconductor packaging manufacturer Shinko Electric and the University of Tokyo also work with Saimemory.

In February, Saimemory and Intel agreed to collaborate on the development of Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), a high-capacity, high-bandwidth and low-power-consumption semiconductor technology.

They aim to develop memory chips with twice or three times the capacity and half the power consumption of the high-bandwidth memory produced by SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology. The plan is to create prototypes by the end of the fiscal year to March 2028 and commence mass production of chips for use in AI data centers by March 2030.

According to SoftBank, this project“will leverage the next-generation memory foundational technologies and technical expertise validated by Intel's Next Generation DRAM Bonding (NGDB) initiative that was completed under the Advanced Memory Technology (AMT) program managed by the US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration through the Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

Japan's FugakuNEXT supercomputer is also scheduled to be deployed around the end of the decade, in Kobe. Led by the Riken Center for Computational Science, the project will combine Nvidia's GPUs and Fujitsu's CPUs, and leverage Nvidia's global market presence, Fujitsu's system integration capability and Riken's software and algorithm technologies.

Nvidia notes that“the contract enables the partners to work side by side in shaping the system's architecture to address Japan's most critical research priorities.”

These include:

Scientific research: Accelerating simulations with surrogate models and physics-informed neural networks; Manufacturing: Using AI to learn from simulations to generate efficient and aesthetically pleasing designs faster than ever before; and Earth systems modeling: Aiding disaster preparedness and prediction for earthquakes and severe weather.