Build1 publisherNot yet confirmed elsewhere2 min readPublished
Rapidus signs 17 design partners while its 2nm foundry still looks for customers
Rapidus has signed 17 partners, including Synopsys and Infosys, to help customers design chips for its 2nm foundry, backed by $15bn of state money. It still has to win the customers who will fill that fab before production starts in the second half of next fiscal year.
The Engineer · Build desk
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What happened
- Nori Chiu, chief investment officer at White Oak Capital, said the key question is who will fill Rapidus's capacity, and called the partnerships progress but not yet commercial success.
- An executive whose company already buys from TSMC said it cannot move all its production to Rapidus and would find it hard to go back if the project failed.
- CEO Atsuyoshi Koike said preparation for mass production is on schedule, and Rapidus works with IBM and has already started pilot work.
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Why it matters
- constraint If the first orders are small or low-priority, Rapidus will struggle to reach the round-the-clock, continuous output that Saito says the business needs to be viable.
- decision TSMC customers have to decide how much volume to risk on a fab they cannot easily walk back from. The safe answer is one product placed as a second source.
- exposure Japanese public money stays committed for about a decade before an IPO puts a market price on the company. A slow order book stays a political liability for that whole period.
Synopsys is a US developer of chip design software, and Infosys is based in India [10]. According to the Reuters report carried by mezha.net, the partners' job is to help customers create chips [9]. I think that is the right thing for a new foundry to build first. A customer cannot commit a product to a process its design tools do not support, so the toolchain has to exist before any wafer order. Seventeen partners can help a customer design a 2nm chip. The report does not name a customer that has committed to buying the wafers [4].
The customer's risk runs one way. The executive quoted anonymously in the report wants to keep TSMC as a supplier and expects a hard way back if Rapidus fails [2]. A buyer in that position commits one product, keeps the rest at TSMC, and treats Rapidus as a second source.
Kazuyoshi Saito of IwaiCosmo Securities set out what the business needs to be viable: a fab running around the clock, stable yields and continuous production [15]. He called that an extremely difficult task [15]. Continuous production needs steady volume. The opening Omdia analyst Akira Minamikawa sees is customers who cannot get the capacity they need at TSMC, particularly those with small orders or lower priority [5].
CEO Atsuyoshi Koike's case rests on total demand. He believes the market can support another maker of advanced chips [12]. In the Ukrainian translation of the Reuters report, he said one or two companies are nowhere near enough [13]. White Oak Capital's Nori Chiu asks the narrower question of who fills this particular fab [1].
Rapidus is also late. Samsung Electronics began producing 2nm chips last year, and TSMC spent decades refining the processes that let it dominate advanced chips [3]. Rapidus's commercial start is set for the second half of next fiscal year [11].
The financing horizon is long. Rapidus plans an IPO roughly by the end of the fiscal year ending March 2032 [16], about a decade after its 2022 founding [18]. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is counting on the project to revive an industry whose share of the global market fell from about 50% in the 1980s to under 10% [6][7]. A government official doubted the results could be judged quickly and compared the risks to the Cool Japan fund, which booked investment losses [17].
What to watch
- The first named wafer customer for Rapidus, and whether it commits a whole product line or a single second-source design.
- Yield and uptime figures from the IBM-linked pilot work before the commercial start in the second half of next fiscal year.
- The full list of the 17 partners, since only Synopsys and Infosys have been reported by name.