Fujitsu Ltd. said Monday it will begin selling its new AI chip globally starting in November. The chip, called Monaka, is a central processing unit built for artificial intelligence work.
The company wants to grow its share of an AI chip market currently led by companies outside Japan. Fujitsu also plans to sell servers made in Japan that use Monaka, with sales in both Japan and Europe.
The announcement comes as the United States and China push to secure their own AI technology. Military use of AI is also expanding, raising the stakes for chip supply chains worldwide.
Fujitsu said demand is growing in Europe for AI products made in Japan. Buyers there are looking for reliable options from a security standpoint, which is pushing Fujitsu to offer chips and servers together as one package.
What Makes Monaka Different
Most AI chips today are graphics processing units, or GPUs. Nvidia Corp. leads that market by a wide margin.
GPUs need large amounts of electricity to run AI tasks. Fujitsu says Monaka is built to improve both processing speed and power efficiency, especially for inference, the process where AI generates answers from what it has already learned.
Monaka uses technology first developed for Fugaku, Japan's top supercomputer. Fujitsu says the chip delivers twice the processing performance of rival CPUs.
The company also claims Monaka can cut the number of servers needed, along with the electricity to run them, by half for the same workload.
Manufacturing and Supply Chain Plans
Fujitsu will outsource Monaka's production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The company is also looking at Japanese chipmaker Rapidus Corp. as a possible manufacturer down the road.
Fujitsu plans to sell the chip to cloud service providers and other customers across the United States and Asia.
Servers that use Monaka will be designed and developed in Japan. They will be built at a Fujitsu plant located in Ishikawa Prefecture.
Sales of the Monaka chip will start in November. Shipments of the servers to customers in Japan and Europe are set to begin next April.
Fujitsu also plans to roll out a tracking system for its supply chain. The system would trace where components come from and their full manufacturing history.
The company is in talks with about 40 firms on adopting this system. Those companies include businesses in the financial and telecommunications sectors.
