Japan forms a group to develop storage, aiming to eliminate HBM

According to the Nikkei News, Fujitsu will join a project led by Japanese technology investor SoftBank Group to jointly develop next-generation memory for artificial intelligence and supercomputers. Japan hopes to revive its once-leading memory production technology and make its companies among the world's top memory manufacturers.

The newly established Saimemory company by SoftBank will serve as the command center for this public-private partnership project, coordinating with Fujitsu and other partners.

Saimemory is committed to developing high-performance memory to replace the current high-bandwidth memory (HBM) achieved through stacked DRAM chips. The project plans to invest 8 billion yen (approximately 51.2 million USD) before the fiscal year 2027 to complete the research and development of prototypes, aiming to establish a mass production system before the fiscal year 2029.

SoftBank will inject 3 billion yen into Saimemory before the fiscal year 2027. Fujitsu and the RIKEN National Institute of Physical and Chemical Research will jointly invest about 1 billion yen. The Japanese government is also expected to subsidize part of the costs through projects supporting next-generation semiconductor research and development.

Fujitsu was once a key player in Japan's world-leading semiconductor industry. Although this Japanese technology group has exited the memory production field, it possesses rich expertise in mass production and quality control.

Fujitsu continues to develop energy-efficient central processing units and maintains close cooperation with customers. Japan's top supercomputer "Fugaku" uses Fujitsu's products.

Saimemory aims to mass-produce memory with a capacity two to three times that of HBM, with power consumption only half that of HBM, and prices on par with or even lower than HBM. The company will adopt semiconductor technology jointly developed by Intel and the University of Tokyo and collaborate with Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. and Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation for production and prototyping.

Intel will provide the underlying stacking technology, which was developed with the support of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its key feature is that chips responsible for functions such as power, computation, and memory are stacked vertically rather than arranged horizontally, thereby increasing the number of memory chips that can be accommodated on a single device while shortening data transmission distances.

This project will also utilize technologies developed by institutions such as the University of Tokyo that assist in heat dissipation and smooth data transmission.

Saimemory will focus on intellectual property management and chip design, outsourcing production to external companies.

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, it is expected that Japan's required computing power will grow more than 300 times by 2030 compared to 2020. However, Japan's self-sufficiency rate in semiconductor components is low, leading to risks such as supply instability and price increases.

Korean companies occupy about 90% of the global HBM market. With the booming global data center industry, the high-performance memory market has been dominated by a few countries and companies.

Around the year 2000, Japanese companies successively exited the memory manufacturing field. After 1999, due to the commoditization of memory and the resulting fierce price competition, Fujitsu gradually ceased internal production during its restructuring process The emergence of artificial intelligence may be changing the industry landscape. SoftBank is working on building its own large data centers, while Fujitsu is developing CPUs for data centers and communication infrastructure, aiming for practical application by 2027.

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