Fujitsu may sell its custom Monaka Arm server chip to rival server makers

Fujitsu, the Japanese system vendor behind the Fugaku supercomputer, is exploring whether to sell its in-house Monaka Arm server CPU to other server makers. The move would be a posture change more associated with AWS Graviton or Nvidia's Grace than with a legacy OEM.

The company said on September 14 that MONAKA will be sold as a standalone product globally from November 2026, targeting cloud operators, data-center operators, and rival server manufacturers. The chip pairs a 2-nanometer compute die with 5-nanometer cache and I/O dies via 3D stacking, with a peak operating frequency of 3.8 GHz and memory transfer rates of 8,800 MT/s.

Fujitsu claims the design delivers roughly twice the AI-inference throughput of rival CPUs and can run equivalent workloads on about half as many servers. The company is also launching a Japan-made MONAKA Server in 1U and 2U rack configurations, with air cooling rated to 40°C ambient, water cooling to 45°C inlet, and a claimed 80% reduction in cooling power. Those performance and efficiency figures are Fujitsu's own claims, not independent benchmarks.

Initial shipments will go to financial, telecom, and manufacturing customers in Japan and Europe in the second half of Fujitsu's fiscal 2026, with general availability from April 2027. No third-party OEM buyer has been publicly named, leaving the "rival server-makers" framing as a Fujitsu pitch rather than confirmed commercial demand. The shift also breaks from the Fugaku era, when Fujitsu's Arm silicon stayed tied to its own supercomputer.