In this news roundup, we are going to touch on IBM Japan’s vice president and chief technology officer, Norishige Morimoto, sharing his outlook for the semiconductor industry, and Sachin Gupta, the man behind IBM’s massive $4.6 billion deal with software company Apptio. Keep reading for the details.
Vital
IBM’s help for Japan’s chipmaking startup Rapidus Corporation is vital to securing long-term global supply, IBM’s Japan VP and CTO Morimoto said as he sat down in an interview with Bloomberg today.
“When it comes to [two-nanometer] technology, we are focusing our efforts on Rapidus and investing a great deal of resources to this project, even sacrificing some capacity that we could have used in other research,” Morimoto told Bloomberg News. “We want Rapidus to succeed. We want it to contribute to a stable supply of the chips we and the world need.”
Rapidus is a semiconductor manufacturer with headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. Backed and invested in by some of Japan’s most prominent electronics firms – Denso, Kioxia, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, NEC Corporation, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, SoftBank, Sony, and Toyota – Rapidus is bound to turn IBM’s two-nanometer chip design into silicon ready for production and aims to manufacture such chips at a large scale in the latter half of this decade. Presently, the most advanced semiconductors are built at a larger three-nanometer mode.
The semiconductor manufacturer also has the support of the government and is led by the veterans of the industry’s supply chain.
The task ahead is creating a world-class chipmaking foundry, making silicon for outside customers, and catching up with the leading Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in a few years.
Rapidus is also working now with IBM and IMEC, a microelectronics research hub based in Belgium.
Engineers from the manufacturer have reportedly already been dispatched to IBM’s Albany NanoTech Complex to design two-nanometer mass production lines while its factory is being constructed in Hokkaido. The Japanese firm will also invest around $35 billion in this project, coming at par with the yearly outlay of TSMC and Samsung.
Meet the man behind IBM’s deal with Apptio
In this second part of our news roundup, we meet the man behind IBM’s whopping $4.6 billion deal with software company Apptio. In previous news reported here on PVP Live, IBM is bound to acquire Apptio for $4.6 billion in cash. Apptio is a worldwide leader in providing clients with financial and operational IT management and optimization software.
The curiosity of Sachin “Sunny” Gupta” about entrepreneurship has led him to what he is today. He followed this curiosity and founded Apptio in Seattle in 2007, but he never expected his company would strike a $4.6-billion deal with IBM, where he also previously worked as a software developer.
He was never wealthy in the past. Sunny only got a partial scholarship in Computer Science at the University of South Carolina, and to make ends meet, he worked as a mover and cleaned dishes. Later on, through his hard work, he earned a full scholarship.
Gupta then became a serial entrepreneur, building companies, landing deals, and winning awards. He was recognized as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012, and also landed in the prestigious Puget Sound Business Journal Power 100 list for 2020 and 2021.
