Japan Plans to Build World's First Supercharged 'Zeta-Class' Supercomputer

Japan has announced its ambitious plan to start constructing the world’s first "zeta-class" supercomputer in 2025. This groundbreaking machine, expected to cost over $750 million, promises to be 1,000 times more powerful than the fastest supercomputers currently in operation.

Scheduled to be fully operational by 2030, the supercomputer, dubbed "Fugaku Next," will be developed by Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu—the same team behind the current Fugaku supercomputer. Fugaku, with its computing power of 0.44 exaFLOPS, once held the title of the fastest supercomputer until it was superseded by the U.S.-based Frontier supercomputer.

The zeta-class supercomputer aims to achieve unprecedented speeds on a zetaFLOPS scale—equivalent to one sextillion calculations per second. This is a remarkable leap from today’s exaFLOPS-scale machines that handle just over one quintillion calculations per second. Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), which unveiled the supercomputer plans on August 28, emphasizes that the new machine will keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) research.

One of the biggest engineering hurdles will be ensuring energy efficiency, since a zeta-class supercomputer built with current technologies might require energy input equivalent to 21 nuclear power plants. Despite this, Japan is committing about ¥4.2 billion ($29 million) for the project’s first year, with a potential total funding of up to ¥110 billion ($761 million) by 2030.

As long as construction remains on schedule and no other teams manage to build a zeta-class machine first—a highly unlikely scenario according to experts—the Fugaku Next supercomputer will establish Japan once again as the leader in supercomputing capabilities, far surpassing the computational limits of their existing Fugaku.

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