SiPearl raises €130M to build AI chips for EU’s Jupiter Supercomputer

Europe’s push for tech independence just got a serious boost.

SiPearl, a French startup building high-performance chips for supercomputing and AI, has raised €130 million ($152 million) from a group of investors including Taiwan’s Cathay Venture, according to a report from Bloomberg. The funding will help the company scale up the development of its flagship Rhea1 chip and get it ready for mass production.

EU-Backed Startup SiPearl Raises €130M to Industrialize Its AI Superchip Rhea1

The Rhea1 chip is a key piece of Europe’s strategy to stop relying on U.S. and Asian tech giants. Built with 80 cores from Arm and packing over 61 billion transistors, the chip will be used to power Jupiter—a European supercomputer project backed by the EU and based in Germany. The machine is expected to support research in fields like medicine, energy, and defense.

“European Union-backed chipmaker SiPearl has raised €130 million from investors including Taiwan’s Cathay Venture to invest in research and development and industrialize its Rhea1 chip,” Bloomberg wrote.

SiPearl was founded in 2019 with funding from the EU’s European Processor Initiative, an effort to build out homegrown computing technologies across the continent. Today, the company has a 200-person team spread across France, Spain, and Italy and operates data centers in France focused on chip design.

CEO Philippe Notton said European cloud companies don’t have the chip-making resources of U.S. giants like Amazon or Google.

“The US hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are designing their own chips, and they have the means to do it,” he said at a press event. “European cloud players don’t have those means, and will rely on solutions like ours.”

The latest funding round marks the first French investment for Cathay Venture, a semiconductor-focused private equity arm of Taiwan’s Cathay Financial Holding. Other backers in the round include the European Innovation Council Fund, Arm, and Atos SE.

To manufacture the Rhea1 chip, SiPearl has tapped TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker.

The company is already looking ahead. CFO Jean-Luc Gilbert said SiPearl plans to raise €200 million for a Series B between 2026 and 2028.

With Europe betting big on AI and compute sovereignty, startups like SiPearl are stepping into a vacuum—building the kind of tech infrastructure the continent once left to others.