Initiative overview
The initiative responds to a structural vulnerability in Japan's digital economy: domestic companies account for only approximately 30% of the basic cloud services market, leaving Japan heavily reliant on foreign providers. The source identifies this as a strategic risk, particularly given that basic clouds handle critical information Japan considers important to manage autonomously. The emergence of generative AI further heightens concerns about supply resilience, prompting the government to act under the Economic Security Promotion Act by designating cloud programmes as specified critical products.
METI approved subsidies to five projects, totalling up to 72.5 billion yen. The recipients are GMO Internet Group (up to approximately 1.93 billion yen), Sakura Internet (up to approximately 50.1 billion yen), a joint application from RUTILEA and AI Fukushima (up to approximately 2.56 billion yen), KDDI Corporation (up to approximately 10.24 billion yen), and a joint application from Highreso and Highreso Kagawa (up to approximately 7.70 billion yen). All five projects involve the provision of GPU cloud services as computational resources for AI developers. Additionally, METI will establish a study group with the five companies and AIST to identify technological challenges and organise future directions for Japan's AI compute strategy.
