SiPearl, the France-based company building European high-performance processors for supercomputing and AI, announced the definitive closing of its €130 million Series A financing round with a third and last tranche of €32 million.
The third tranche of funding is backed by two existing investors — the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and the French State via French Tech Souveraineté — and a new investor, private equity firm Cathay Venture of Taiwan.
Seed funded by the European Union, SiPearl was launched in January 2020 under the auspices of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium which aims to foster the return of high-performance energy-efficient processor technologies in Europe.
Since then, the company has fulfilled its mission by building a processor team of 200 employees in France, Spain, and Italy, and set up its own sovereign infrastructure with data centres in northern France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design.
SiPearl has completed the conception of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, Rhea1.
“With 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, Rhea1 is composed of more than 61 billion transistors,” said SiPearl.
“Several weeks ago, it taped-out and was handed off to the world’s leading independent foundry, TSMC in Taïwan, for start of manufacturing.
“Rhea1 will be available for sampling in early 2026. It is supported by a wide range of compilers, libraries and tools, from traditional programming languages such as C/C++, GO and RUST to modern AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.
“Rhea1 is perfectly suited to traditional HPC(3) workloads – its initial target market – and AI inference workloads. Thanks to both the generous memory capacity and high bandwidth in-package memory (HBM), it will deliver extraordinary performance and energy-efficiency with an unrivalled byte-per-flop ratio.
“Rhea1 will equip the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer which is owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Germany).
“It will also be a key component of iconic European collaborative projects such as Aero, OpenCUBE, HIGHER and Riser to promote the emergence of a sovereign European cloud, and Excellerat, MAX, ODISSEE, and Plasma-PEPSC to run simulation applications in strategic fields such as engineering, materials, dark matter, plasma.
“Thus, SiPearl first family of products will help ensure the future of Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness.”
Philippe Notton, CEO & Founder of SiPearl, said: “Today’s geopolitical and economic context confirms the vision that led to SiPearl’s inception.
“Sovereign hardware is mandatory to ensure Europe’s independence and sovereignty in AI and strategic fields such as security and defence.
“With the tape-out of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, we are showing that Europe now has a competitor capable of challenging non-European leaders.
“Because Europe needs strong and independent partners in the global semiconductor ecosystem, we have chosen to forge closer ties with Taiwan, a country at the forefront of this industry worldwide. We would like to thank the investors who have placed their trust in us and who support us in this endeavor.”