Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, approved an extra 631.5 billion yen, or about $4 billion, to support the state-backed chipmaker Rapidus, reports Reuters.
Funding for fiscal 2026 will primarily go toward improving prototypes and front-end wafer processing at Rapidus’s IIM-1 facility in Chitose, Hokkaido. With this, total government R&D support reaches about 2.35 trillion yen.
METI also said that its affiliate, NEDO, will help with semiconductor design projects alongside Fujitsu and IBM Japan. The goal is to boost domestic demand for Rapidus’s future products.
Rapidus was founded in August 2022 with backing from eight major Japanese companies: Toyota, Sony, NTT, NEC, SoftBank, Denso, Kioxia, and MUFG. The company is part of Japan’s push to recover from thirty years of decline and regain a place in advanced logic chip manufacturing.
Led by CEO Atsuyoshi Koike, Rapidus plans to begin 2nm mass production at its Hokkaido site by fiscal 2027. The company works with IBM on process development and with IMEC in Belgium on wider R&D efforts.
In February 2026, Rapidus received 267.6 billion yen from the government and from 32 private companies, including Canon, Fujitsu, and Sony. This investment made the government Rapidus’s largest shareholder, with 11.5% of voting rights and a golden share veto.
TSMC and Samsung both started 2nm volume production in 2025, so Rapidus will be about two years behind when it launches. TSMC controls about 70% of the global foundry market. Rapidus is taking a different approach by offering small-volume, fast-turnaround foundry services to customers seeking options beyond Taiwan’s concentration risk.
Early confirmed clients include Fujitsu and Tenstorrent. Still, finding more customers is the project’s biggest challenge. Without steady orders, it is hard to improve yields or justify the facility’s costs, even with subsidies.
