In Japan’s glory days of the the late 1980s, the country accounted for about half of the global semiconductor industry, and the U.S. was left to beg, plead and threaten as it tried to get a small slice of the Japanese market. A bestselling book in Japan during the Cold War’s waning days called “The Japan That Can Say No” suggested that Tokyo could leverage its dominance in semiconductors to control the world’s military balance—and perhaps help the Soviet Union instead of the U.S.
Today, the great fear driving chip investments in both U.S. and Japan is China. The U.S. policy calls for helping allies such as Japan build a supply chain that is less exposed to risks posed by a hostile Beijing. While the U.S. is expanding its own chip production through the Chips and Science Act, which includes some $53 billion of spending, people involved in the Rapidus project (between U.S. and Japan) said the U.S. needed further global diversification. ..The Rapidus project aims to get Japan back into the heart of the business of chip making by building facilities on the northern island of Hokkaido, known for its ski resorts. Rapidus says it wants to begin pilot production in 2025 and full-scale production in 2027. Some 6,000 workers are being drafted to put up the factory.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has said that it intends to help Rapidus achieve its goals, and that it wants the Japanese semiconductor industry to have revenue of some $100 billion in 2030, triple the 2020 figure. The ministry is pitching in billions of dollars for additional projects in Japan. TSMC is building an $8.6 billion factory on the southern island of Kyushu and is in talks about a second. Assuming it gets the money, Rapidus still has to master a level of manufacturing technology attained so far by only two companies, TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. Both are projected to have the ability to mass-produce 2-nanometer chips by 2025.
Excerpts from Peter Landers and Yang Jie, Japan’s Plan to Become a Chipmaking Champ Hinges on This Football-Loving Engineer, WSJ, July 6, 2023