Axelera AI secures €61.6 million to develop AI chiplet

Axelera AI, an Eindhoven-based AI hardware company, announced it received a €61.6 million grant to develop a high-performance AI chipset, Titania. The chipset will provide high-performance, energy-efficient, and scalable AI inference, a process that makes AI models produce predictions or conclusions.

The funding comes from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and member states as part of the Digital Autonomy with RISC-V for Europe (DARE) Project. This new funding follows the successful close of an oversubscribed $68 million Series B financing round, bringing the total amount raised by Axelera AI to more than $200 million USD in just three years.

As part of the DARE consortium, Axelera AI will support the EuroHPC JU in its effort to develop a World-Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. DARE aims to foster the design and development of European processors, accelerators, and related technologies for extreme-scale, high-performance, and emerging applications.

Axelera AI in the AI landscape

As the AI market grows at 28%+ CAGR with the vast majority of that expansion driven by inference. However, existing concerns around cloud-based solutions' performance, cost, efficiency and sustainability are intensifying due to industry advancements. Innovations such as reasoning models, including OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek R1, require significantly more inference computing than earlier transformer models. Axelera AI says Titania will enter the market in 2028 and help solve current AI challenges. Meanwhile, the company will grow its development team in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.

Accelerating AI developments

The new chiplet builds upon Axelera AI’s approach to Digital In-Memory Computing (D-IMC) architecture, which provides near-linear scalability from the edge to the cloud.“Our D-IMC technology leverages a future-proof, scalable multi-AI-core architecture, ensuring unparalleled adaptability and efficiency. Enhanced with proprietary RISC-V vector extensions, this versatile mixed-precision platform is engineered to excel across diverse AI workloads,” explained Evangelos Eleftheriou, CTO and co-founder of Axelera AI.

“Uniquely, our architecture facilitates scaling from the edge to the cloud, streamlining expansion and optimizing performance in ways traditional cloud-to-edge approaches cannot. We are setting a new standard for AI infrastructure, making true scalability a tangible reality," he added.

Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and CEO at Axelera AI said: “Today, we deliver a cutting-edge hardware and software platform for accelerating computer vision on edge devices at a fraction of current solutions' cost and energy consumption. Titania builds upon this unique product suite. We're grateful to the EuroHPC DARE Project and the countries involved for helping accelerate the development of this groundbreaking AI inference technology for HPC data centers.”

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