ai& and Tenstorrent Launch JapanFold, Bringing Open-Source, Sovereign Drug Discovery to Japan
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ai& and Tenstorrent launched JapanFold, a drug discovery platform running on ai&'s sovereign infrastructure, powered by Tenstorrent Galaxy™ superclusters. Japanese researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech firms can now access frontier drug discovery models at a fraction of the cost of conventional cloud infrastructure, with every computation running entirely within Japan.
JapanFold serves the leading open-source structural biology models:
Boltz-2, OpenFold3, ESMFold-2, OpenDDE, Protenix-v2, RoseTTAFold3, OpenBind-0, and Nesso-1 for structure and binding affinity prediction,
BoltzGen, RFdiffusion 3, and PXDesign for de novo drug design, covering the full discovery workflow from protein folding through drug candidate generation, and
ESMC and SaProt for protein embeddings to support downstream tasks
ai& optimizes and serves every JapanFold model on Tenstorrent processors, delivering 1:1 accuracy without the cost premium – because the models scale nearly linearly on Tenstorrent hardware, doubling the number of processors doubles output.
“Japan’s research community should never have to choose between world-class AI and keeping their data sovereign. JapanFold removes that trade-off entirely—frontier drug discovery, open-source, sovereign, and fully in-country,” said David Bennett, CEO and co-founder, ai&.
JapanFold is accessible in three ways:
Workbench: Fold and design proteins directly in the browser. No install, no sign-up.
API: One HTTP endpoint for every model at api.japanfold.aind.com/.
Agent Skill: Plain-language access from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and more.
“Scalable hardware and open-source models are changing what's possible in biology and drug discovery,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent. “Tenstorrent delivers fast, scalable compute, and ai& owns the full stack in Japan. Together, we’ve turned it into a platform researchers can actually use with JapanFold.”
The launch of JapanFold is the first step in ai& and Tenstorrent's broader effort to make sovereign, open-source AI infrastructure available to scientific research communities across the region.
For more information, please read our blog and try JapanFold at japanfold.aiand.com.
About ai&
ai& is a global AI technology company founded on the simple conviction that whoever owns and optimizes the full stack wins. By integrating next-generation data center infrastructure, heterogeneous compute, and frontier model services into a single optimized platform, ai& gives enterprises and developers the performance, economics, and data sovereignty that no single-layer provider can match. Founded in Japan and expanding globally, ai& is building the foundation for the AI-native future.
For more information, visit www.aiand.com, or follow ai& on LinkedIn and X.
About Tenstorrent
Tenstorrent is an AI compute company led by CEO Jim Keller - architect of Apple A4/A5, AMD Zen, and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. The company builds RISC-V-based AI processors and systems for developers, enterprises, and sovereign infrastructure worldwide. In addition to servers and workstations, Tenstorrent licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG. Backed by Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity, and others, Tenstorrent has raised over $1B+ and operates from Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo, and Bangalore.
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