Fujitsu will begin selling overseas an artificial intelligence processor developed from the technology behind its Fugaku supercomputer.
The company plans to sell the chip in Japan, the United States and the Asia-Pacific region starting in 2027, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on the 13th. AI inference relies on central processing units, the logic chips that handle computation.
Japanese chipmakers designed and manufactured their own CPUs in the 1980s and 1990s but have since largely withdrawn from the market. U.S. companies, led by Intel, now dominate the market for server and PC processors.
The chip Fujitsu plans to export is Monaka, a 2-nanometer CPU for AI workloads. Its main feature is a sharp gain in computing performance per unit of power. Fujitsu handles the design, while Taiwan's TSMC manufactures the chip under contract. It is the first time Fujitsu has offered an advanced AI chip for export rather than for use in its own products.
Customers are already lined up. A supply deal with Super Micro Computer of the United States has been finalized, and Fujitsu intends to expand its supply chain to large U.S. cloud providers.
Fujitsu also plans to sell AI servers equipped with Monaka. Prototype testing of those servers has begun at 24 companies in finance, telecommunications and other sectors, and talks on additional deployments are under way with about 40 more, according to the report. Fujitsu is also expected to outsource production of a next-generation 1.4-nanometer AI chip to Rapidus, the Japanese foundry.
The company has set specific targets. It aims for cumulative revenue of 250 billion yen (about 2.19 trillion won) from external CPU sales alone through fiscal 2030. It is targeting sales of 60,000 AI servers and plans to broaden the business by bundling add-on services such as platforms for AI development and operations.
Fujitsu, along with Toshiba and others, helped lead the global semiconductor market in the 1980s. But as it lost ground to Korean, U.S. and Taiwanese rivals, it exited in-house production in the 2010s and focused on design and development. The export push is seen as an attempt to re-enter the market with an independently developed CPU, riding a surge in demand for AI logic chips.
