Dutch chipmaker AxeleraAI has received a €66 million grant from the EU

AxeleraAI, one of the few companies in Europe producing computer chips for artificial intelligence, has received a grant of up to 61.6 million euros ($66 million) to develop a chip intended for data centres, as part of the EU's initiative to enhance the sector. Europe is working to close the AI competitiveness gap with the United States and China by funding local chip manufacturers and establishing publicly funded data centres, known as "AI factories," that will be accessible to European researchers, businesses, and startups.

"It's a moment of pride," said Axelera CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo, highlighting the opportunity for his company to grow its operations. The Eindhoven-based firm secured funding from EuroHPC, the agency responsible for overseeing the European Union's network of supercomputers and AI factories, to create a chip optimized for "inference" AI computing. Inference is akin to the application or "thinking" phase in AI, which companies like Google and France's Mistral require when developing large models, similar to a brain, that are typically trained on Nvidia chips.

"We're not here to compete with Nvidia in the data centre training space," Del Maffeo stated. "However, when the network is set up and you want to run it, we are creating a solution that can provide extremely high performance ... we can achieve that." The rise of the Chinese large AI model DeepSeek, which claims to offer cutting-edge performance at a lower cost, may drive up the demand for inference computing as AI models become more accessible.

Axelera's upcoming Titania chip will be based on the open-source RISC-V standard, which is gaining popularity in the automotive industry and in China as an alternative to systems dominated by Intel and Arm. Axelera's existing chip, "Metis," is utilized in "edge AI" applications outside of data centres, such as in factories where it analyzes CCTV footage to detect safety issues. Since its founding in 2021, Axelera has raised $200 million from investors, including Samsung.