Overview
- Bloomberg reported on November 10 that Rapidus has not produced usable SRAM, a milestone that had been slated for summer 2026 and that the company now appears likely to miss by several months.
- Rapidus said it will keep working to meet targets and aims to begin mass production in the second half of fiscal 2027, but acknowledged engineers face strong pressure to speed development.
- On November 4 Rapidus announced plans to add three factories and one R&D base near its existing wafer fab to form an integrated production-and-research cluster around its Sapporo-area site.
- IBM has opened a local office in Chitose to support Rapidus and regional partners on advanced process work, showing continued external technical backing even as SRAM challenges persist.
- SRAM is the on-chip static memory that large AI caches rely on, so failing that milestone can block chip validation and delay the ramp of 2nm devices that Rapidus plans to use for AI and energy-efficient high-performance computing.