Axelera AI has unveiled its Europa chip, an AI processor unit (AIPU), designed to support high-performance Edge computing use cases, including generative AI and computer vision applications.

According to the AI hardware startup, the AIPU delivers up to 629 TOPS at INT8 precision, and has set a new industry benchmark for performance, power efficiency, and affordability.

The chip features eight second-generation AI cores, each incorporating Axelera’s advanced Digital In-Memory Compute (D‑IMC) technology, alongside two clusters of eight RISC‑V vector processing cores for non-AI pre- and post-processing.

Additionally, Europa has 64GB of memory capacity, quadruple that of Axelera’s Metis AI chip, and provides 200 Gbps of DRAM bandwidth and 128 MB of L2 SRAM. Available in multiple form factors and with PCIe 4x Gen4 connectivity, Europa also integrates with a wide array of systems, including workstations, Edge servers, enterprise servers, and rack-mount servers, and can scale up to a four-chip 256GB configuration.

According to the startup, the high-throughput design of Europa allows it to deliver “three to five performance efficiency over the leading industry solutions in the same product category, as well as delivering best-in-class performance for generative AI solutions.”

While Axelera did not name those “leading industry solutions,” in an interview with CRN, Alexis Crowell, Axelera AI’s CMO and general manager of Americas, said the comparisons all related to recent Nvidia products used for edge computing purposes, including the L40 GPU and unspecified Jetson system-on-chip products.

“Organizations shouldn't have to choose between the raw compute power they want and the real-world usability they need,” said Fabrizio del Maffeo, co-founder and 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.”

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

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands – the same town where photolithography equipment maker ASML is based, Axelera AI announced in March 2025 that it had received a €61.6 million ($71.5m) grant from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s Digital Autonomy with RISC-V for Europe (DARE) Project to support its development of its Titania AI inference chiplet.