French chip designer SiPearl has finally taped out its long-awaited Rhea1 supercomputer chip, ready for silicon sampling in early 2026.
www.eenewseurope.com, Jul. 09, 2025 –
The timing of the design being sent to TMSC in Taiwan implies the company is confident the chip, with 80 ARM Neoverse V1 cores and 61bn transistors, will not require a re-spin. It needs to be ready for installation in the flagship Jupiter exascale supercomputer in Germany.
The chip was originally planned for TSMC’s N6 6nm process with sampling in 2024 and was then delayed until 2025 and now 2026. It uses four stacks of high bandwidth memory (HBM) from Samsung in the package.
SiPearl has also raised another €32m from a key Taiwanese investor to bring its Series A funding round to a close with a total of €130m. The funding will be used to prepare for the Series B round in the next few weeks and the R&D on the next generation processor Rhea2, which is expected to use the higher performance Neoverse V3 core, and was planned for sampling in 2025.
“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,” said Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl. “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.
The company was initially funded by the European Union in January 2020 under the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium. The company has built a team of 200 staff across France, Spain, and Italy, set up its own sovereign infrastructure with data centres in northern France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design.
The emulation has ensured that the chip is supported by a wide range of compilers, libraries and tools, from traditional programming languages such as C/C++, GO and Rust to AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.
Rhea1 will be used in Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Germany).
It will also be a key component in other 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 and plasma research.
The closing of the series A round brough a new investor in major private equity firm Cathay Venture of Taiwan in its first investment in France. Cathay Venture anticipated the mega-trend of growing semiconductor penetration rate toward all segments and has been building a portfolio with over 27% semiconductor and electronics ecosystem companies.
Cathay Venture is growing its investment in EU semiconductor companies and plans to diversify its portfolio.
SiPearl now includes ARM, the Atos Group, through its Eviden business, and the French government as investors alongside the European Investment Bank and European Investment Council (EIC).
“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 endeavour,” he said.
“SiPearl is one of the few semiconductor design companies in the world that, from its inception, set out to address the computing power and energy efficiency challenges faced by modern datacentres’ needs,” said Stanley Yu, Assistant Vice President of Cathay Venture.
“Through long-term collaboration with European datacentre system integrators, SiPearl validated its designs using hardware emulators built to simulate real-world datacentre environments. As a result, even before its chips went into production, SiPearl had already demonstrated exceptional performance in terms of power consumption which secured the Jupiter supercomputer. In addition, SiPearl is also expected to participate in several other European supercomputing projects. SiPearl’s shareholder base is robust and strategically aligned. Furthermore, with its founder team’s familiarity of Taiwan semiconductor industry, SiPearl is poised to strengthen its connections and collaboration with the advanced semiconductor supply chain in Taiwan, in parallel with Cathay Venture’s investment portfolio”,
“SiPearl was one of the first companies backed by the EIC Fund,” said Svetoslava Georgieva, Chair of the EIC Fund Board. “Their groundbreaking work in designing energy-efficient, high-performance processors has confirmed the strategic value of that investment. We are delighted to see the closing of the largest Series A funding round in the European fabless semiconductor industry — a major milestone for the company. With its deep European roots, SiPearl’s pioneering work strengthens Europe’s position in HPC and AI, while advancing our technological sovereignty.“
“As part of the France 2030 investment program, the French state is committed to supporting bold ventures into technological areas that are critical to European sovereignty. As one of the very few European companies working on the design of a family of complex high-performance CPUs, SiPearl could have an enormous impact on our strategic autonomy”, said Bruno Bonnell, Secretary General for Investment in charge of the France 2030 program.
“The tape-out of SiPearl’s Rhea1 processor marks a major milestone for European technological sovereignty in supercomputing. This groundbreaking European processor will not only power JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, but also drive innovation across several EuroHPC JU-funded projects, with SiPearl at their core. Developed under the European Processor Initiative, Rhea1 brings cutting-edge performance and energy efficiency, reinforcing Europe’s position in the global supercomputing race”, said Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC JU.