Fujitsu to sell 144-core Monaka Arm servers to rivals and clouds in November

Fujitsu is moving its Monaka processor from a long-term roadmap item to a commercial product available in November. The chip diverges significantly from the Fugaku supercomputer silicon it was originally derived from, instead utilizing Broadcom’s 3D-chip stacking technology. It features four 2nm compute dies with 36 cores each, four 5nm SRAM chiplets, and a central I/O die supporting 12 channels of DDR5 and PCIe 6.0 connectivity.

The commercial strategy involves selling the raw processor to third-party server manufacturers, which places Fujitsu in direct competition with its own hardware. The company has designed three specific server models: a 1U unit supporting air or liquid cooling, a 2U air-cooled model, and a 2U liquid-cooled model intended for multi-node HPC and academic deployments. All configurations utilize the 144-core processor, with clock speeds varying between 2.1GHz and 2.9GHz depending on the thermal design.

The primary value proposition for cloud operators and AI-focused buyers is the claimed ability to handle double the inferencing output of rival CPUs. This performance claim, combined with the ability to operate in air-cooled environments up to 40C, addresses specific pain points in current datacenter infrastructure. The availability of a new source of inferencing power is particularly relevant given the ongoing fragility of silicon supply chains.

Fujitsu is also targeting the sovereign computing market by emphasizing that the servers are manufactured in Japan. This positioning is aimed at European customers and domestic users who prioritize local production and supply chain independence. However, the adoption by third-party server makers remains uncertain, as the industry has historically made only token efforts to deliver products hosting Arm chips despite years of touting their power efficiency.