Axelera AI unveiled Titania, a high-performance, energy efficient and scalable AI inference chiplet. The development of this chiplet builds on Axelera AI's innovative approach to Digital In-Memory Computing (D-IMC) architecture, which provides near-linear scalability from the edge to the cloud. To support this development, Axelera AI is receiving up to €61.6 million in funding from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and member states as part of the Digital Autonomy with RISC-V for Europe (DARE) Project. This new funding follows the successful close of an oversubscribed $68 million Series B financing round, bringing the total amount raised by Axelera AI to more than $200 million USD in just three years.

As part of the DARE consortium, Axelera AI will support the EuroHPC JU and its effort to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. DARE aims to foster the design and development of European processors, accelerators, and related technologies for extreme-scale, high-performance, and emerging applications.

"Our D-IMC technology leverages a future-proof, scalable multi-AI-core architecture, ensuring unparalleled adaptability and efficiency. Enhanced with proprietary RISC-V vector extensions, this versatile mixed-precision platform is engineered to excel across diverse AI workloads," explained Evangelos Eleftheriou, CTO and co-founder of Axelera AI. "Uniquely, our architecture facilitates scaling from the edge to the cloud, streamlining expansion and optimizing performance in ways that traditional cloud-to-edge approaches cannot. We are setting a new standard for AI infrastructure, making true scalability a tangible reality."

Why it matters: The AI market is growing at 28%+ CAGR with the vast majority of that expansion driven by inference. However, existing concerns around performance, cost, efficiency and sustainability of cloud-based solutions are intensifying due to industry advancements. Innovations such as reasoning models (i.e. OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek R1) require significantly more inference computing than earlier transformer models. Targeting a deployment date of 2028, Axelera AI's Titania is engineered to address these challenges by delivering superior throughput and efficiency for data-intensive AI applications and future zetta-scale HPC centers at a competitive price.

To support this development effort, Axelera will grow its research and development teams in the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium.

How it works: The Titania chiplet-based architecture will leverage the company's unique D-IMC technology along with RISC-V capabilities, to meet the increasing AI demands across various market sectors, including HPC, enterprise data centers, robotics, automotive, and others, while maintaining the efficiency of an edge-oriented architecture. Leveraging D-IMC allows for near-linear scalability in performance without the significant power and cooling overhead typical of other solutions. Integrating RISC-V technology with vector extensions enables Axelera AI to rapidly innovate in response to evolving customer needs. Multiple Titania chiplets will be packaged in a System-in-Package (SiP).

"This is an important milestone and validation of our technology. Since Axelera AI was founded in July 2021, we have continuously delivered technologies to help customers tackle the AI industry's biggest challenges and efficiently implement AI capabilities into their products," said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder and CEO at Axelera AI. "Today, we deliver a cutting-edge hardware and software platform for accelerating computer vision on edge devices at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption of current solutions. Titania builds upon this unique product suite. We're grateful to the EuroHPC DARE Project and the countries involved for helping accelerate the development of this groundbreaking AI inference technology for HPC data centers."

The EuroHPC JU was established to develop, deploy, extend and maintain an integrated world-class supercomputing and quantum computing infrastructure to foster and support a highly competitive and innovative HPC ecosystem. Axelera AI's Titania technology is ideal for building extremely scalable, energy-efficient and highly resilient HPC and data center technologies.

"I am proud to announce the launch of the DARE project which marks a significant milestone for European digital sovereignty," said Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director. "This ambitious initiative will drive innovation in both hardware and software technologies and leverage the full power of HPC and AI to develop secure, efficient and European-led solutions for the future."

The development of Titania aligns with Axelera AI's mission to democratize AI and complements the company's current product offerings. This includes the Metis AI Platform that simplifies the development, integration and deployment of AI inference acceleration and achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance.