SiPearl CEO Philippe Notton on Europe’s AI processors, chiplets, and semiconductor sovereignty

July 13, 2026 -

Europe’s ambitions to strengthen its semiconductor ecosystem have brought renewed attention to companies developing homegrown computing technologies. Among them is SiPearl, a French fabless semiconductor company designing high-performance, energy-efficient processors for supercomputing, artificial intelligence (AI), and data centers. Its first-generation processor, Rhea1, is currently in production and is set to power JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer.

Building advanced processors in Europe comes with technical, financial, and strategic challenges that extend well beyond chip design. In this edition of Leaders Talk, I spoke with Philippe Notton, founder and CEO of SiPearl, about Europe’s semiconductor ambitions, the evolving role of CPUs in AI infrastructure, the shift toward chiplet architectures, and what technology sovereignty means in practice.

Philippe Notton, founder and CEO of SiPearl, with the company’s first-generation processor, Rhea1.

Glaucileine Vieira: When you founded SiPearl, what challenge did you expect to be the most difficult—and what challenge has actually proved the most difficult?

Philippe Notton: I expected the fund raising to be difficult because we were, of course, only looking for European investors. Beginning-2020, when we initiated the Series A roadshow, the semiconductor industry was not the cup of tea of European private equity firms.

Finally, I found other difficulties:

• Access to equity: we have raised €130 million equities from public funds (European Investment Council Fund, France 2030, European Investment Bank), corporate investors (Arm, Bull) and one private equity firm, Cathay Venture Capital from Taiwan with the blessing of the European Union.
• Access to engineers (recruitment is complex with a global shortage in Europe). That’s why we have 6 R&D centres in Europe and 23 nationalities on board!
• Access to public procurement. For this topic, EU is still late compared to the US.

Glaucileine Vieira: The conversation around AI infrastructure is increasingly dominated by GPUs and accelerators. Looking ahead, what role do you see high-performance processors playing in AI systems, and are we at risk of overlooking their importance?

Philippe Notton: In SiPearl we always had a strong faith in CPUs, because...

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