Adding to what everyone else has said, Japan is known to be a threshold nuclear state (from a weapons perspective). They explicitly stay around just weeks away from being able to perform a nuclear weapons test, and they are commonly referred to being "a screwdriver's turn" away from having a nuclear weapon.
They have massive government investment in not only maintaining that status, but also doing so on a completely domestic supply chain as much as possible.
Therefore they have the same need for supercomputers that the US national labs do (perhaps more so, since they're even more reliant on simulation), and heavily prefer locally sourced pieces of that critical infrastructure.
I wouldn't be surprised if an incredibly large part of the local push for Rapidus is to pull them off of TSMC and the supply chain risk for their nuclear program in case the whole China/Taiwan thing comes to a head.
Oh that's very interesting. Unfortunately for all of us many countries are revisiting nuclear ambitions it seems, but I can see how that makes sense from the Japanese perspective, given an environment with more aggression in general and a lot much reliable US as an ally.
But: if you consider the amount of nuclear generating capacity has (4th in the world, more than Russia), and its advanced space program, “within one year” probably means closer to “weeks or months” than “three hundred and sixty four days”.
They have massive government investment in not only maintaining that status, but also doing so on a completely domestic supply chain as much as possible.
Therefore they have the same need for supercomputers that the US national labs do (perhaps more so, since they're even more reliant on simulation), and heavily prefer locally sourced pieces of that critical infrastructure.
I wouldn't be surprised if an incredibly large part of the local push for Rapidus is to pull them off of TSMC and the supply chain risk for their nuclear program in case the whole China/Taiwan thing comes to a head.