Japan to Dispatch 200 Engineers to Tenstorrent for Training

TapTechNews June 17 - According to Nikkei Asia, Japan's semi-official organization LSTC will send a total of 200 engineers to the chip design company Tenstorrent for training in the next five years.

The full name of LSTC is 'Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center Consortium', which was established in 2022 led by the advanced foundry enterprise Rapidus, and its members include the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (TapTechNews note: namely RIKEN), the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and many Japanese universities.

Tenstorrent is led by the legendary CPU architect Jim Keller as its CEO. It has signed a multi-level AI development cooperation agreement with LSTC in February this year to jointly build a 2-nanometer AI accelerator chip.

Japan used to be the leader in the world semiconductor industry, but the number of chip engineers has significantly declined in the past 20 years, a sharp reduction of 60%.

And according to the data of the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industry Association, the overall professional and technical personnel gap in the Japanese semiconductor industry may reach 100,000.

The move by LSTC is aimed at compensating for the semiconductor talent gap to some extent, and promoting the revitalization of the Japanese semiconductor industry.

The 200 engineers to be dispatched this time will mainly come from university graduate students and 30- to 40-year-old chip engineers in private enterprises, and they will work at Tenstorrent for one to two years.

The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will provide billions of yen in subsidies for this training plan to help these engineers pay for the costs during the training in Japan and living overseas.

For Tenstorrent, the addition of Japanese engineers can help it expand its R & D team and save recruitment costs.