Rapidus, Japan’s state-backed bid to make leading-edge logic chips at home, now has two engineering centers in India. HCLTech opened them in Bengaluru and Hubli, with a ceremony on October 26 at HCLTech’s headquarters in Noida. Their job is to do semiconductor engineering for Rapidus: mask design, design infrastructure, process design kit (PDK) development, design technology co-optimization and layout design.
HCLTech will also help build a pipeline of Indian engineers to fill Rapidus’s staffing needs in Japan. Neither company disclosed the value of the deal, how many engineers will work at the two sites, or a timeline.
Rapidus CEO Atsuyoshi Koike said building a strong engineering ecosystem is essential to the company’s goal of next-generation chip manufacturing in Japan, and that India’s pool of chip engineers would complement its Japanese operations. HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar framed it as part of growing Japan-India strategic collaboration.
A foundry still looking for its first signed customer
The context matters more than the ribbon-cutting. Rapidus has a working pilot line at its IIM-1 fab in Chitose, Hokkaido, which started running in April 2025 with an ASML EUV scanner installed the previous December. It has shown working 2nm gate-all-around transistors there, using a process derived from IBM’s 2nm work. Mass production is targeted for the second half of 2027. Chairman Tetsuro Higashi said on October 21 that the project is running almost on schedule.
What it doesn’t have is a named customer. Koike said earlier this year that more than 60 companies were in talks and about ten had received preliminary price quotes. No volume contract has been announced. Higashi now expects the first customers to be mostly US AI companies. Potential buyers have stayed cautious, and some have said they can’t move all their work away from TSMC.
The money keeps coming anyway. Rapidus raised 267.6 billion yen in February, 167.6 billion of it from 32 private companies, and the government added 150 billion yen in equity in June. On October 20, the trade ministry proposed another 400 billion yen over fiscal 2027 to 2029, which would lift direct government investment to 650 billion yen. That still has to clear the budget process.
What HCLTech actually brings
This deal builds on Rapidus CORE, the ecosystem program Rapidus launched on October 5. Its first layer is 17 “Design Solution Associates” meant to sit between customers and the foundry and help with early 2nm designs. HCLTech is one of them, alongside Cadence, Synopsys, Infosys, Wipro, MosChip, Quest Global, Toppan, Dai Nippon Printing and several Malaysian design houses.
HCLTech is a big services shop (more than 230,000 staff, $14.8 billion in revenue for the 12 months to September). It has been building out chip work in India. In September it opened a 1.85 billion rupee (about $19 million) post-silicon validation, test and failure analysis lab in Bengaluru with 40,000 square feet of space.
Look at the task list, though. PDK development, DTCO and mask design are foundry-side jobs. They make Rapidus’s process usable. They don’t bring a chip designer through the door with a purchase order. So does this help with the customer problem?
Indirectly, yes. A chip company deciding whether to bet a product on a new 2nm foundry wants a mature PDK, solid design rules and enough support engineers to get a tape-out done on time. A startup fab with a thin bench can’t promise that. Renting capacity in India is a fast way to thicken the bench before 2027. The talent pipeline into Japan addresses the same gap.
The limit is just as plain. HCLTech, Infosys and Wipro sell engineering hours. They can make Rapidus easier to design for, and they talk to chip clients every day, but none of them can sign a wafer order on a customer’s behalf.
The number to watch is still one: the first customer Rapidus names with real volume. Until that lands, every partnership is groundwork.