Approval of Plans for Ensuring a Stable Supply of Cloud Programs under the Economic Security Promotion Act

1. Overview

As digitalization has advanced throughout society, cloud services have become indispensable as functions working to process information in a wide range of people’s lives and industrial activities.

Given this situation, the share of companies that have business bases in Japan in the domestic market for basic cloud services (or basic clouds) is about 30%, indicating that more and more companies are relying on such services provided by foreign companies.

Basic clouds play a fundamental role in information processing. If Japan cannot secure a domestic system for developing a basic cloud, it may need to completely rely on basic clouds provided by other countries, including systems that handle critical information that Japan should autonomously manage.

Moreover, among cloud programs, generative AI has the potential to replace people in conducting a variety of creative work, which is not possible with conventional AI, and accordingly, it is expected to have a significant impact on industrial activities and people's lives. If any constraint occurs in the supply of generative AI services in Japan, it may cause an enormous impact on the country. To address this, it is important for Japan to secure computational resources to build a development infrastructure and strengthen the resilience of the service provision system in Japan.

In light of this situation, under the Economic Security Promotion Act, the Government of Japan decided to designate cloud programs as specified critical products and, as an effort to ensure the stable supply of cloud programs, approve and support plans filed by companies to improve computational resources in Japan for use by a wide variety of developers, especially for generative AI.

Furthermore, as AI continues to evolve in the future, the sophistication of computational resources will be indispensable. METI will establish a study group consisting of five successful companies that METI has decided to support this time together with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and other organizations that have been providing computational resources over five years. The study group will strive to identify technological issues and challenges to be overcome for business expansion and organize directions that Japan should take in the future.

2. Approved projects

Name of company	Outline of the plan for ensuring supply	Date of approval
GMO Internet Group, Inc.	Provision of a GPU cloud service as a computational resource involving AI (maximum subsidy: about 1.93 billion yen)	April 15
Sakura Internet Inc.	Same as above (maximum subsidy: about 50.1 billion yen)	April 15
RUTILEA, Inc. AI fukushima Co.,Ltd. (joint application)	Same as above (maximum subsidy: about 2.56 billion yen)	April 19
KDDI Corporation	Same as above (maximum subsidy: about 10.24 billion yen)	April 19
Highreso Co.,ltd Highreso Kagawa Co.,ltd (joint application)	Same as above (maximum subsidy: about 7.70 billion yen)	April 19

Related Link

• Ensuring the stable supply of cloud programs (in Japanese)

Division in Charge

Software and Information Service Industry Strategy Office, IT Industry Division, Commerce and Information Policy Bureau