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NEDO subsidizes Monaka under a green data center program targeting 40% energy savings by 2030, yet the chip's 2nm and 5nm dies come from TSMC rather than a domestic fab. That gap between a made-in-Japan design and Taiwanese manufacturing sits awkwardly against the sovereignty that Fujitsu and RIKEN are seemingly keen to attach to the program.
Japan has committed more than 2 trillion yen to Rapidus for 2nm production in Hokkaido by 2027, and roughly 1.2 trillion yen to TSMC's Kumamoto fabs, and NEDO has separately backed a dedicated 1.4nm AI chip from Fujitsu and IBM Japan to be built entirely in Japan by Rapidus. Monaka predates that domestic capacity, however.
Monaka's successor is already assigned to a flagship machine. FugakuNEXT , the roughly $750 million RIKEN system announced in August last year with Fujitsu and Nvidia, will pair a 1.4nm-class Monaka-X that adds Arm SME2 with Nvidia GPUs linked over NVLink Fusion , the interconnect Nvidia opened to third-party CPUs in 2025. RIKEN targets more than 600 FP8 exaFLOPS within a 40MW envelope and roughly 100 times Fugaku's application performance, with operation around 2030. FugakuNEXT is Japan's first flagship supercomputer to place GPUs at its core, a departure from the CPU-only A64FX design of the original Fugaku.
Fujitsu has firmed up rather than changed the Monaka plan across three years of disclosures, with the core count, node split, and an anticipated launch date of 2027 remaining unchanged since 2023. Fujitsu didn't disclose pricing, and its DGEMM, STREAM, and INT8 figures remain estimates until independent testing at the 2027 launch
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/fujitsus-monaka-cpu-stacks-its-entire-cache-on-a-separate-5nm-die-and-narrows-to-256-bit-sve2#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/my-account
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