Axelera Announces Europa AIPU, Setting New Industry Benchmark for AI Accelerator Performance, Power Efficiency and Affordability

Axelera AI, the leading provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology, today announced Europa™, an AI processor unit (AIPU) that sets a new performance/price standard for multi-user generative AI and computer vision applications. Europa’s combination of processing power, energy and thermal efficiency, compact packaging, and multiple form factor options make it ideal for compute-intensive, multi-modal AI inference applications from the edge to enterprise servers. Designed to be cost effective and accessible, Europa enables any organization to unlock the power of cutting-edge AI applications.

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Next Gen Architecture for Real World AI Processing Power

The Europa AIPU features eight second-generation AI cores, each incorporating Axelera’s advanced Digital In-Memory Compute (D‑IMC) technology and large vector engines, delivering up to 629 TOPS at INT8 precision. Complementing the AI cores are two clusters of eight dedicated RISC‑V vector processing cores for non-AI pre- and post-processing, achieving a peak performance of 4915 GOPS. An integrated H.264/H.265 decoder further offloads media tasks, enabling customers to reserve the host CPU entirely for business logic and application-level workloads. These cores, programmable through the Voyager SDK, will provide better total cost of ownership than having to offload to other hardware.

Europa’s purpose-built architecture eliminates memory bottlenecks by integrating 128MB of on-chip L2 SRAM and 256-bit LPDDR5 interface to provide 200GB/s bandwidth. This high throughput design delivers 3 to 5 times performance efficiency (performance per watt and performance per dollar) over the leading industry solutions in the same product category, as well as delivering best-in-class performance for generative AI solutions.

“Organizations shouldn't have to choose between the raw compute power they want and the real-world usability they need,” said Fabrizio del Maffeo, CEO of Axelera. “Europa makes enterprise class AI processing power available to nearly anyone. From manufacturing automation to intelligent surveillance to autonomous systems, Europa enables the next generation of breakthrough AI applications without compromise, complexity or massive budgets. We’re changing the equation of what’s possible with AI at scale.”

With its Europa and Metis AIPU platforms, Axelera offers a full range of accessible AI accelerator solutions for everything from very low-power, size-constrained edge device applications to more demanding and performance-intensive use cases including humanoid robotics and enterprise server solutions. Across its product lines, Axelera’s emphasis on optimizing processing power and energy efficiency delivers maximum TOPs for any use case.

Built for Ease of Integration and Deployment

Axelera optimized Europa to simplify design integration and support deployment flexibility. Specifically:

• Europa’s unified architecture simplifies board design by combining specialized AI cores with 16 RISC-V vector processors and a hardware-accelerated HEVC265 decoder to reduce CPU overhead and enable simultaneous real-time processing of visual, language, sensor, and speech workloads with no external requirements.
• With multiple form factors and PCIe 4x Gen4 connectivity, Europa seamlessly integrates with a wide variety of hosts making it easy to upgrade existing edge machines and servers with groundbreaking AI capabilities.
• Europa’s built-in secure enclave technology provides enterprise-grade protection for sensitive workloads.
• Programmable with the same user-friendly Voyager SDK as Metis, developers can easily leverage the same tool to deliver their inference solutions across a wide range of devices and use cases.
• Its compact 35x35mm package maximizes performance density, making it ideal for edge deployments while delivering the processing power to meet server and data center needs.

Powerful Local Processing with Europa PCIe

Axelera will also offer the Europa AIPU integrated in a PCIe card form factor. Europa PCIe cards support scalable configurations – from single-chip 16GB to four-chip 256GB solutions – to meet a wide variety of workload requirements. Leveraging the power of Europa, the cards can process complex workloads locally, and preprocess and decode multiple 4K HEVC265 video streams simultaneously, all with minimal latency and economical power consumption.

Shipments for the Europa AIPU and PCIe card will begin in the first half of 2026.

Supporting quotes:

“IT4LIA’s AI Factory initiative is a strategic cornerstone in building a sovereign European infrastructure for artificial intelligence,” said Daniele Cesarini, Head of AI/HPC Architecture at Cineca. “Our collaboration with Axelera AI within the DARE project reflects our commitment to integrating advanced European technologies into national HPC environments. We are ready to host and validate Axelera’s Europa accelerators within our infrastructure, supporting their deployment in real-world, high-performance AI workloads. This partnership is a concrete step toward a scalable, energy-efficient AI ecosystem, and demonstrates how European innovation in semiconductor design can be effectively translated into operational excellence. By working together, we aim to accelerate the adoption of sovereign AI technologies and reinforce Europe’s leadership in sustainable, high-performance computing.”

“At SURF, we empower researchers with world-class digital services and drive innovation through collaboration,” said Valeriu Codreanu, Head of High-Performance Computing and Visualization at SURF. “Our partnership with Axelera AI, using Metis in SURF’s Experimental Technologies Platform and exploring Europa, reflects our excitement for emerging AI technologies that have the potential to transform research.”

"The Ultralytics YOLO family of models has set the industry standard for computer vision globally,” said Glenn Jocher, CEO of Ultralytics. “The performance we've achieved running YOLO models on Axelera AI's Metis platform has been remarkable, delivering the speed and efficiency our users demand for real-world computer vision applications. Our collaboration has proven that advanced AI inference can be both powerful and accessible. With Europa's expanded capabilities coming next year, we're excited to broaden YOLO's deployment across entirely new use cases.”

“As a company at the forefront of AI innovation, Almawave is excited to collaborate with Axelera AI on the launch of Europa,” said Valeria Sandei, CEO, Almawave S.p.A. “By combining Axelera’s next-generation inference platform with our expertise in developing cutting-edge AI applications and our proprietary language model Velvet, we can deliver powerful, accessible, and energy-efficient solutions to our customers. This partnership reinforces our shared commitment to bringing advanced AI to the Edge, with real impact across industries.”

“SECO is a leading provider of Edge AI solutions, empowering customers to bring intelligence and efficiency directly to their devices,” said Maurizio Caporali, Chief Product Officer at SECO. “We integrated Metis into our Edge AI product line earlier this year and have been impressed by the significant boost in performance and scalability it delivers. We are excited to partner with Axelera as they continue to expand their world-class inference portfolio and enable even broader adoption of AI at the edge across industries.”

“As the leading provider of AI software, Multiverse prides itself on partnering with the very best technology companies to enable our solutions,” said Rodrigo Hernandez, Global Director of Gen AI at Multiverse Computing. “Axelera AI is building world-class hardware that powers the most performant and energy efficient AI inference solutions around the globe. Their next generation of hardware, Europa, will be a welcome addition to our infrastructure as we pursue our mission to make AI faster, cheaper and more energy efficient.”

“E4 Computer Engineering is widely renowned as a leader in integrating the latest technology solutions,” said Cosimo D. Gianfreda, CEO and Co-Founder at E4. “We are testing Metis from Axelera AI and are very impressed with its capabilities as well as the support provided by the Voyager SDK. We firmly believe that their next solution, Europa, offers a leap in performance such that data centers will more efficiently support the needs of their customers and we are prepared to integrate this new solution into our ecosystem.”

About Axelera AI

Axelera AI is the leading provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology for AI inference, including computer vision and generative AI applications. Its first-generation product is the game-changing Metis™ AI platform – a holistic hardware and software solution for Edge AI inference which delivers the world’s highest performance and power-efficiency at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. Headquartered in the AI Innovation Center of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Axelera AI has R&D offices in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the UK, with more than 200 employees in 18 countries. Its team of experts in AI software and hardware hail from top AI firms and Fortune 500 companies.

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