OKYO, Oct. 18, 2024—Since the beginning of 2024, sJapan’s chipmaking industries have been buzzing with hopes of recovery, and smart-chip startup Rapidus Corp., Oct. 18 reportedly secured the initial investment threshold of 100 billion yen ($666 million) thanks to additional funding commitments of Toyota Motor Corp. and Denso Corp.
Rapidus, founded in 2022, is invested by 8 Japanese and one American companies including the two automotive manufacturers, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and Softbank Corp.
Toyota and Denso offered to make fresh additional investments to Rapidus following commitments of four big Japanese banks for a total of 25 billion yen, on top of 7.3 billion yen initial investment commitments. In the second tranche of investments, IBM Japan is expected to join, according to the Yomiuri newspaper Oct. 18.
Rapidus is planning experimental manufacturing and assembly line operations in April 2025 in a prelude to commercial production in 2027 with a GOJ money infusion of 920 billion yen for R&D and chip fabrications.
BUT it would ultimately need 5 trillion yen ($33 billion) to become a competitive chip maker, or short of 4 trillion yen to have its production facilities moving. Who’ll fund the gaping gap is anybody’s guess, and one reliable jinx about Japanese companies infused with government money is that all have been cursed with failures or become zombies.
Elpida Memory, renamed from NEC Hitachi Memory, that had been under GOJ rehab programs in the 2010s, is a DRAM, flash and other memory chip maker that now is Micron Memory Japan, a unit of an American maker. It went bust in the mid-2010s with 450 billion yen debts, including taxpayer money.
In September 2024, Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (PSMC) abruptly called it quits to start a chipmaking joint venture with Softbank of Japan in the northern Japan prefecture of Miyagi – apparently miffed by the GOJ demand that the PSMC commit to operate no less than 10 years in Japan in exchange for a GOJ subsidy.
SO, it looks that the early 2024 hullabaloo about Japan’s chip recovery was a day dream…
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