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.
ROHM and Quanmatic put quantum annealing to work on a chip fab's front-end process, lifting output about 3%. Here's why a number that sounds small is actually a big deal on a factory floor.
The world's first factory built to mass-produce diamond semiconductors has opened in Okuma, the Fukushima town that hosts the wrecked Daiichi nuclear plant. How a material researchers chased for 40 years found its purpose in the place that needed it most.
Ultra-pure water is the invisible backbone of chipmaking, so clean that a stadium of it may hold less impurity than a single sugar cube. Three Japanese firms, Kurita, Organo and Nomura Micro Science, lead the world. We unpack their technical edge and the contest with global rivals like Veolia.
Asahi Kasei has developed a photosensitive polyimide film for advanced semiconductor packaging, turning a liquid material into a laminated film, the same playbook behind ABF. We explain what it means for AI chiplet packaging, how it stacks up against US and Korean rivals, and why Japan keeps winning the materials game.
An Osaka University team has shrunk a key step in magnetic tunnel junction fabrication from hours to about 1.7 seconds using flash-lamp annealing—up to thousands of times faster than conventional methods, with implications for MRAM mass production and flexible sensors.
Kyoto University associate professor Mitsuaki Kaneko is commercializing SiC-based mixed-signal LSIs that work where silicon fails. His complementary JFET approach targets ADC samples in 2028-2029, opening a niche the big five SiC power players have largely ignored.
TSMC's Japanese subsidiary JASM posted a quarterly profit of NT$951 million (about $30 million / ¥4.78 billion) in Q1 2026, the first time the Kumamoto fab has been in the black since mass production began in December 2024. We unpack what the 14-month turnaround means against the backdrop of Japan's ¥1.23 trillion in subsidies, the Sony-Denso-Toyota partnership, TSMC's Arizona and Dresden expansions, and Rapidus's high-stakes 2nm bet.
Toshiba reported record net profit of 1.9673 trillion yen (about $12.5 billion) for fiscal 2025, a sevenfold jump driven by gains from selling its stake in Kioxia and a structural surge in transmission and HDD demand from AI data centers. Nearly two years after the JIP-led privatization, what has Japan's biggest private-equity restructuring actually changed? We compare it with Blackstone's Hilton success and the cautionary tale of Toys R Us.
Kioxia forecast a 48-fold jump in Q1 net profit to 869 billion yen ($5.5 billion), making the Japanese NAND maker Japan's single-largest AI beneficiary on a quarterly basis after Toyota. We unpack the US ADS listing plan, the supercycle reshaping NAND prices, the HBM gap with Samsung and SK Hynix, and what it all means for Japan's broader semiconductor revival.
Rohm posted a record 158.4 billion yen net loss for fiscal 2026 after writing down 193.6 billion yen on SiC power semiconductor assets. CEO Katsumi Azuma called it clearing out the pus, a blunt admission that Japan's biggest SiC bet was mistimed. With Wolfspeed out of Chapter 11 but smaller, Chinese rivals cutting wafer prices to a third, Denso's takeover approach withdrawn and a three-way merger under discussion, the silicon carbide gold rush has hit its reset moment.
PM Sanae Takaichi pledged to effectively double research funding and build a 'new technological nation' targeting AI, semiconductors and quantum, and the Japan Growth Strategy carrying those measures was adopted by cabinet on July 21, 2026. We look at the 17 strategic fields and 62 priority technologies against the reality of Japan's 3.44% R&D-to-GDP ratio and its falling PhD numbers.
Nikon posted a record net loss of 86 billion yen (about $548 million) for the year ended March 2026, dragged down by a 90.6 billion yen writedown on its German SLM Solutions metal 3D printer acquisition. As Canon attacks the lithography market and TSMC Kumamoto ramps up 3nm production, Japan's optics giant is missing its own country's semiconductor boom. We unpack the ASML technology gap, the diversification bets that went wrong, the EssilorLuxottica stake, and the new mid-term plan built around "near-leading-edge" ArF immersion tools.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions has signed an MOU with TSMC to form a next-generation image sensor joint venture. Why is the 51% market leader pairing with Taiwan instead of going it alone? We compare it with the US CHIPS Act, EU Chips Act, and Korea's K-Chips Act, and explore the Apple-Samsung tug-of-war shaping the physical-AI era.
Japan's next-gen supercomputer Fugaku NEXT bets against the cooling consensus: warming water above 30°C to cool AI servers and cutting cooling power by 20%. It may also adopt 'ZAM,' a new memory developed by SoftBank and Intel that stands DRAM chips on edge with magnetic-field coupling. Why Japan is choosing efficiency over the gigawatt-scale arms race that defines US Frontier and El Capitan.
On May 7, 2026, the Nikkei 225 closed 3,320 yen higher at 62,833, the largest single-day point gain in its history, surpassing the 3,217 yen record of August 6, 2024. Hopes of a U.S.-Iran ceasefire and an AI semiconductor rally drove it. Yet the 5.58% gain does not crack the all-time top 20, a sign that a higher index level has changed what a record means. Inside the 10.8 trillion yen session, the link to Korea's KOSPI passing 7,000, and how the index reached 70,000 by June.
GPU-to-GPU optical interconnects were forecast to arrive around 2033. NVIDIA just pulled them in by five years, putting co-packaged optics into the NVLink switch of its 2028 Feynman generation, and locking in supply with $2 billion investments in each of Lumentum and Coherent. Furukawa Electric is spending 38 billion yen to more than quintuple DFB laser chip capacity; Sumitomo Electric supplies core components for NVIDIA's Quantum-X Photonics switches but was left out of the funding round. Where Japan's optical suppliers stand, and how NTT's IOWN runs on a different clock.
JBIC and Japan's three megabanks signed $2.221 billion in loans for the first three projects of a $550 billion US investment ceiling, the price Tokyo paid to bring Trump's tariffs down to 15%. The deal, the dollar-funding crunch, and what changed when the Supreme Court ruled IEEPA tariffs unlawful in February 2026.
By fiscal 2034, new data centers and semiconductor fabs will add peak electricity demand equal to seven nuclear reactors in Japan, with roughly 60 percent of capacity clustered around Tokyo and the connection queue backed up. The government's answer is Watt-Bit Integration. Set against Virginia's pricing fix, Ireland's renewables mandate, and Singapore's hard area cap, Japan's regional-distribution-plus-decarbonization bet comes into focus.