Rapidus signs 17 design partners while its 2nm foundry still looks for customers

Synopsys is a US developer of chip design software, and Infosys is based in India ^[3]. According to the Reuters report carried by mezha.net, the partners' job is to help customers create chips ^[2]. 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 ^[14].

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 ^[11]. 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 ^[12]. He called that an extremely difficult task ^[12]. 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 ^[15].

CEO Atsuyoshi Koike's case rests on total demand. He believes the market can support another maker of advanced chips ^[9]. In the Ukrainian translation of the Reuters report, he said one or two companies are nowhere near enough ^[10]. White Oak Capital's Nori Chiu asks the narrower question of who fills this particular fab ^[7].

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 ^[8]. Rapidus's commercial start is set for the second half of next fiscal year ^[4].

The financing horizon is long. Rapidus plans an IPO roughly by the end of the fiscal year ending March 2032 ^[6], about a decade after its 2022 founding ^[16]. 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% ^[13][18]. A government official doubted the results could be judged quickly and compared the risks to the Cool Japan fund, which booked investment losses ^[17].