Loss-making mobile-game studio KLab has signed an MOU to bring an undisclosed partner's counter-drone system to the UAE. Inside a game company's pivot, UAE royal money, and Japan's neutral-broker play.
Japan set targets to rebuild its reactors even as its utilities keep getting caught faking data and fixing prices. How the US, France and Korea arrange nuclear oversight, and why no model is scandal-proof.
PMs Takaichi and Modi are set to turn cow dung into vehicle fuel and build a 2.5-million CNG-car market in India — a clean-energy deal that doubles as a hedge against China's grip on electric cars.
An island nation surrounded by ocean buys most of its salt from the far side of the world. Starting at a white island off Hiroshima, here is why Japan imports its salt from Mexico and Australia.
First Rheinmetall, then Anduril: in a single month, foreign arms makers signaled they want to build in Japan. We map the three routes they are taking, the April export-rule change that opened the door, and the identity shift Japan is now choosing.
Japan's government just promised over 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion) across 17 strategic sectors by 2040. We unpack the suspicious arithmetic: a 6.5x return promised on chips, an undisclosed public-private split, and a deadline conveniently 14 years away.
Germany's largest arms maker, Rheinmetall, is eyeing its first production base in Japan. Who is the company behind the guns on the Leopard 2 and Japan's Type 90 tank, how did the Ukraine war transform it, and why does it now want to export from Japan?
TSMC, the world's largest foundry, is quitting GaN power-chip manufacturing. ROHM, which built its flagship 650V parts inside TSMC's fabs, has licensed the technology and is racing to mass-produce in Hamamatsu by 2027. A look at the China-US rivalry and Japan's vertical-integration bet.
A ball bearing with a 0.6mm bore, smaller than a sesame seed. One firm in a former coal town in Hokkaido reportedly makes around 70% of the world's sub-millimeter bearings. Here's how.
Tokyo Ohka Kogyo is No. 1 in photoresist with a 24.7% share and No. 2 in EUV resist with 28%. How a 1936 maker of coal-lamp battery material became a chokepoint in the AI chip supply chain.
Japan's navy just put 45,000 personnel on SAP ERP for logistics. The US Army got there in 2018, Germany in 2011. Inside Japan's late arrival, its siloed legacy systems, and whether Fujitsu can deliver.
Intel switched on the world's first High-NA EUV machine; TSMC skipped the $400M tool. Being slow to the newest lithography once cost Intel a lost decade. Is TSMC repeating that mistake? Its confidence rests on Japan: Mitsui Chemicals' EUV pellicle and the HOYA/Shin-Etsu/AGC mask-blank near-monopoly (about 90% share).
Mitsui Chemicals was first in the world to mass-produce the EUV pellicle, a free-standing film tens of nanometers thick. From the ASML license to the carbon-nanotube pivot and a 2027 upgrade, here is why one invisible bottleneck sits with a single Japanese plant.
Not TSMC, not ASML. A Japanese chemical maker with ~$240M in sales quietly supplies about 70% of the world's photoresist sensitizer—the ingredient inside the ingredient that prints every advanced chip.
Japan discards 650,000 tons of small electronics a year, yet recovers only about 15%. The rest mostly leaks abroad through an untracked invisible flow. On June 5, 2026, the Environment Ministry picked six pilots enlisting movers and couriers to keep the metals home.
Dysprosium and terbium, essential to EV magnets, were China's one unbroken monopoly. In 2025, Australia's Lynas, backed by Japan since 2011, produced them outside China for the first time. What it means, and what it doesn't.
JX Advanced Metals, maker of roughly 60% of the world's sputtering targets, is investing about 23 billion yen to expand its Hitachinaka plant by 1.6x and selling its Chilean copper mine stake to Lundin Mining for $215 million, redirecting the cash into chip materials. A look at a 120-year-old miner remaking itself as an advanced-materials company.
A fresh 150-billion-yen government injection pushes the state's share of Rapidus's capital to roughly 60%. Yet Tokyo capped its voting rights at 11.5%, keeping the firm out of state-enterprise territory by design. We unpack subsidies versus equity, the fate of the 2nm skeptics, and the question of who will actually buy the chips.
METI has unveiled Japan's first post-Fukushima numeric target for replacing nuclear reactors: up to 5 by the 2040s, 14 by the 2050s. Behind the decarbonization, energy-security and AI-demand drivers lies a harder question — regulatory capture, the Nuclear Village, and whether the regulator can be trusted.
Japan's government and three megabanks gained access to a frontier AI model for cyber defense, with the digital minister calling to expand it to critical infrastructure. Set against the new US executive order and the EU AI Act, here is how Tokyo's approach differs.