THE CRUNCH
Axelera has formally launched its Europa AI Processing Unit (AIPU), a chip designed for inference workloads that can reach up to 629 TOPS at a 45 W power draw. The device is available in three form factors: a chip for custom boards, a half-height PCIe card, and a full-height PCIe card. The architecture supports INT4, INT8, and INT16 precision and includes eight second-generation AI processing cores, 16 RISC-V vector,
The Europa AIPU is the direct successor to the company's previous Metis chip and is built around eight second-generation AI processing cores and 16 RISC-V vector cores. It features 128 MB of L2 SRAM and a 200 GB/s DRAM bandwidth. The chip targets agentic systems, vision-language models, and generative AI. The Edge 232p PCIe card, which houses a single Europa AIPU, is available in validated configurations inside a Dell XE5 and a Supermicro 111AD. The Server 250p card steps up to four Europa AIPUs for combined performance of over 2,500 TOPS.
Axelera claims the Server 250p delivers up to 4,205 tokens per second on the Qwen3 8B model at up to 32.1 tokens per second per watt. The company reports a sales pipeline exceeding $1.5 billion and more than 600 customers. It is also developing its first chiplet, the Titania, which is intended for rack-mount servers and supercomputers.