At present, the Japanese supercomputer manufacturers are on the brink of world-wide market penetration. Even though the US government funded market will probably remain closed to them for some time to come, their offerings are competitive outside of the US. Their early move to CMOS technology while still maintaining proven proprietary vector architectures gives them a cost advantage over the traditional ECL vector computers and a performance advantage, for the time being at least, over MPP RISC systems. At last, the US supremacy of the supercomputer market is challenged by credible suppliers.