SiPearl, a French company developing high-performance, energy-efficient processors for supercomputing and AI, announced on July 8, 2025, the final closing of its €130 million Series A, the largest in Europe’s fabless semiconductor industry. The round, including a €32 million third tranche, was backed by Cathay Venture (Taiwan), EIC Fund, and France 2030’s French Tech Souveraineté, with prior investors like Arm, Atos Group’s Eviden, and the European Investment Bank. The funding supports the industrialization of SiPearl’s Rhea1 processor and R&D for next-generation chips.
Funding: €130M Series A, including €32M final tranche, largest in European fabless semiconductors.
Investors: Cathay Venture, EIC Fund, France 2030, Arm, Atos Eviden, EIB.
Rhea1 Processor: 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, 61B+ transistors, taped out to TSMC for 2026 sampling.
Applications: Powers JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, and projects like OpenCUBE and HIGHER.
Team: 200 employees across France, Spain, Italy; data centers in France.
Market Impact: Strengthens EU’s technological sovereignty in AI and supercomputing.
Rhea1, Europe’s most complex processor with 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores and over 61 billion transistors, was taped out to TSMC’s 6nm N6 process for manufacturing, with sampling expected in early 2026. It will power the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre and owned by EuroHPC JU. Rhea1 supports HPC and AI inference workloads, compatible with C/C++, Go, Rust, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. It’s also integral to projects like OpenCUBE and Excellerat, enhancing Europe’s cloud and simulation capabilities.
Philippe Notton, CEO and founder, stated, “Sovereign hardware is mandatory to ensure Europe’s independence in AI and strategic fields like security and defense. 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 €130M Series A, bolstered by Cathay Venture’s first French investment, funds Rhea1’s industrialization and R&D for Rhea2, targeting data centers and enterprise AI. Cathay Venture, part of Taiwan’s Cathay Financial Holdings ($400B+ assets), sees EU-Taiwan collaboration as complementary, with 27% of its portfolio in semiconductors. SiPearl’s ties with TSMC and 30 European Processor Initiative (EPI) partners, including scientific and industrial leaders, strengthen its ecosystem. A Series B round is planned for late 2025.
The global HPC market is projected to reach $60 billion by 2028, with AI driving demand for exascale computing. Europe’s $8 billion EuroHPC JU initiative underscores its push for technological sovereignty, as U.S. hyperscalers like Amazon and Google dominate chip design. Posts on X, like @thetechstartups, highlight SiPearl’s role in reducing reliance on foreign tech. The company’s 200-person team and French data centers position it to lead in energy-efficient, sovereign computing.
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