Rapidus, a new Japanese chipmaker, is starting a subsidiary in the US. The company wants to recruit and support American customers through that venture. Rapidus aims to produce 2nm chips later this decade at its Japanese factory, which is still under construction.
The new American subsidiary is called Rapidus Design Solutions, the chip maker writes in a press release. The company's first office will be in Santa Clara, where Nvidia and Intel are also located. RDS must recruit American customers and collaborate in developing chips. According to the chipmaker, this specifically concerns fabless companies that design chips, but do not produce them themselves.
Customers in Silicon Valley will initially form a large part of the Rapidus customer base, CEO Atsuyoshi Koike said. Nikkei. It will probably mainly concern start-ups and new companies. Rapidus previously announced a partnership with Tenstorrent. That's a Canadian company that designs AI chips. AMD and Apple veteran Jim Keller heads Tenstorrent.
Henri Richard will be in charge of the American Rapidus subsidiary. He previously worked at companies such as AMD, IBM, NetApp and SanDisk, the chipmaker reports. Richard has already assembled “the key leadership team for Rapidus' US sales and marketing,” the company said.
Rapidus was founded in 2022 by the Japanese government and a consortium of major Japanese companies and investment partners. This includes, for example, Sony, Toyota, Kioxia, NEC and SoftBank. The company wants to start producing 2nm chips in 2027. Rapidus works together with the American IBM, among others. The chipmaker says it already has “more than a hundred” engineers working with IBM researchers at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York state. The Belgian imec also supports Rapidus.
At the beginning of this month, the Japanese government announced that it would make additional support available for Rapidus. This amounted to a total of 3.6 billion euros. The money is used, among other things, for chip production, although part of it also goes to research into chip packaging, for example for 'packaging' chiplets. Rapidus will become an external foundry that produces chips exclusively for other companies, just like TSMC, for example.
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