Japan's AI, semiconductors, software and the business impact of emerging technologies.
In April 2024, the group's own security company flagged the problems in this system, and the operator ran four rounds of emergency maintenance. Yet the warning stopped at the vice-president level and never reached the group chairman. Whether the flagged problem is the same opening the attacker used in 2026 is something the company itself says it has not yet established.
Tohoku University spinout TAI lit up its test chip on the first tape-out and scheduled fabrication of its mass-production version for the fourth quarter of 2027. But in this field, companies that raised several times more money did not die because they could not build a chip.
The US holds the models, the platforms and chip design. China holds scale, deployment and speed. Japan holds upstream steps that no advanced chip can bypass. But an indispensable supplier is not the same as the one who writes the next rules. Measured with the same yardstick across the three countries, this article tests whether Japan's advantages can still buy it a position.
LSTC's NEDO medical-AI programme will spend over ¥6bn before a March 2029 gate — on AI systems, measured data and a requirements spec. The chip itself is not in its scope.