Rapidus, Japan's state-backed chip foundry venture, has moved its 2-nanometre pilot line in Chitose, Hokkaido into trial production ahead of schedule, and executives say a second-generation process node is now the priority for the plant's first commercial customers. The company confirmed this week that engineering samples using the initial 2nm process are already being evaluated by prospective clients, with volume production still targeted for 2027 but the roadmap for a denser follow-on node pulled forward by several months.
The announcement matters because Rapidus has spent four years trying to close a gap that most industry analysts assumed was uncloseable: Japan's chip manufacturing base fell roughly a decade behind TSMC and Samsung after the country's semiconductor industry ceded leading-edge production to Taiwan and South Korea in the 2000s and 2010s. Rapidus was built specifically to skip the intermediate nodes entirely and go straight to 2nm, backed by more than ¥1 trillion in Japanese government funding alongside investment from Toyota, Sony, NTT, SoftBank and seven other domestic companies.
The Chitose facility's approach differs from TSMC's in one structural way that Rapidus executives have repeatedly emphasised: single-wafer processing rather than batch processing, which the company says shortens the time from design to sample chip from around three months industry-wide to roughly three weeks. IBM, which licensed its 2nm process technology to Rapidus in 2023, has continued providing engineering support at the site, and Rapidus president Atsuyoshi Koike said the faster prototyping cycle is the plant's main pitch to fabless customers weighing whether to trust a first-generation foundry with next-generation designs.
South Korea and Taiwan are not standing still while Rapidus builds out capacity. Samsung Foundry has continued expanding 2nm output at its Pyeongtaek complex, and TSMC's Hsinchu and Kaohsiung 2nm lines are already running commercial volume for Apple and other major customers, giving both companies a multi-year head start on yield optimisation that Rapidus has openly acknowledged it cannot fully close before its first commercial wafers ship.
Rapidus is betting instead on customers who value domestic supply-chain resilience over marginal cost, a pitch that has gained traction with Japanese and US customers concerned about geographic concentration of advanced chip production in Taiwan. Several Japanese automakers and industrial equipment makers have signalled interest in sourcing 2nm chips domestically for applications where a supply disruption would be costly to work around, even if Rapidus's per-wafer pricing is not yet competitive with the established foundries.
The Japanese government's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has treated the project as a national strategic priority since its 2022 founding, and officials have not ruled out additional funding rounds if Rapidus needs support scaling from pilot to volume production. A final decision on that additional funding is expected once the company reports results from its first commercial engineering samples later this year.