Japan is preparing to reclaim its position at the forefront of high-performance computing with FugakuNEXT, a hybrid AI-HPC supercomputer designed to surpass exascale and venture into uncharted zetta-scale territory. Announced at a ceremony in Tokyo on August 22, the project marks a major collaboration between RIKEN, Fujitsu, and, for the first time, Nvidia, bringing together Japan’s sovereign infrastructure and U.S. GPU technology in a system built for the next decade of scientific and industrial challenges.
Fugaku, installed in 2020, held the world’s top spot for two years and played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic, where its simulations helped guide research and response efforts. Today, it still ranks seventh globally, but Japan is already looking ahead. FugakuNEXT is expected to come online around 2030 at RIKEN’s Kobe campus on Port Island, with a development budget exceeding 110 billion Yen ($740 million USD). This marks the latest in a lineage of Japanese flagship supercomputers—from the Earth Simulator in 2002 to the K computer in 2011 and Fugaku itself—each of which once held the crown for computational speed.
