EINDHOVEN, Netherlands – September 15, 2026 – Axelera AI, the European leader in AI acceleration hardware, announced the launch of the Europa architecture with a growing ecosystem of OEM, ODM and technology partners, including validated systems with Dell and Supermicro. Europa, a next-generation AI Processing Unit (AIPU), extends the advantages of Axelera AI’s edge-first architecture to more demanding enterprise and data center workloads, giving organizations a practical path to run production AI on infrastructure they control.
With a sales pipeline that exceeds $1.5 billion, Axelera’s performance per watt leadership is driving customer wins across AI factories and gigafactories in Europe. The company has deployments with more than 600 customers across the globe, spanning defense, robotics, drones, retail and security applications.
Inference is recognized as the bulk of the AI compute load, but with rising cloud costs, exponential usage of tokens, power and GPU constraints, and increasingly capable smaller models, the economics of where AI can and should run are changing. Many enterprise applications don’t require the largest frontier models or most expensive hardware; they need infrastructure designed to run persistent AI workloads securely and at a cost organizations can sustain. And with up to 6x the tokens per second per watt than GPU-based solutions, customers can reliably deploy within their own environments without sacrificing performance.
Up to
6x
more tokens per second per watt than competition
Higher is better
Higher is better
Internal results for Axelera Edge 232p, benchmarked against publicly available data for competitor platforms.
Performance of the Axelera Edge 232p will continue to increase with Voyager SDK releases
Axelera products based on the Europa architecture give organizations greater control over where AI runs, where their data goes and what it costs. This is particularly important in Physical AI deployments, and markets such as financial services, healthcare, legal, defense and government, where security, compliance and data sovereignty requirements can limit the use of public cloud AI.
“Dell Technologies is working with AI systems integrator E4 and Axelera AI to support the deployment of next-generation AI infrastructure for the EU AI Factories in Italy and Luxembourg. Together, the collaboration brings the performance, control and sovereignty organizations need to advance AI innovation while keeping critical infrastructure and data aligned with Europe’s digital autonomy goals,” said Peter Barnes, General Manager, EMEA HPC, Dell Technologies
“AI is an imperative at most companies, but ensuring that an enterprise can get the highest return from the infrastructure while controlling their data is imperative,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI. “We built our architecture around some of the hardest constraints in computing: power, energy, cost and the need to process data locally. Europa applies those same principles, expanding from Physical to Enterprise AI, giving organizations the performance they need for increasingly sophisticated workloads while keeping control of their data, infrastructure and economics.”
Built for Modern Enterprise Inference
Europa is designed for the growing mix of AI workloads, including agentic systems, vision-language models, generative AI and machine and computer vision. It gives organizations a practical way to add AI inference capacity in existing server environments while addressing real-world power, cost, security and operational constraints.
Built on the same architecture principles proven across Axelera AI’s existing Embedded, Edge and Server portfolio, Europa brings high-performance, energy-efficient inference to more demanding enterprise workloads. Europa is available as a chip with customers designing their own boards, as a half-height, half-length PCIe card (Axelera Edge 232p) or a full-height, full-length PCIe card (Axelera Server 250p). The standard PCIe form factors enable organizations to add AI capacity without rebuilding their infrastructure around a new platform.
A Broader Partner Ecosystem
Shipping now, Europa is supported by Axelera AI’s growing ecosystem of OEM, technology, software and industry partners. Together, these partners give enterprises a path from AI acceleration hardware to complete, deployable solutions, rather than requiring them to assemble every layer of the stack independently.
The Axelera Edge 232p is available in a fully validated Dell XE5 and a Supermicro 111AD. These new systems join the list of validated and available systems with global OEMs including Advantech, Axiomtek, HPE, Lenovo, Seco and others, with additional systems to be publicly announced soon.
Axelera AI’s broader partner network helps customers address the full set of requirements involved in scaling their AI solutions, from infrastructure and software to industry-specific applications. As the global ecosystem continues to expand, customers will have more ways to deploy Europa in solutions aligned to their performance, operational and business needs.
Simplifying Deployment from Embedded to Edge to Server, Physical or Enterprise AI
Axelera AI’s Voyager Toolchain helps developers optimize existing AI models for Axelera AI hardware and move more quickly from development to production. Supporting all Axelera AI hardware, Voyager provides a consistent foundation for deploying AI inference from edge devices to enterprise infrastructure.
Developers are also welcome to use Voyager Wingman, an agentic platform that can easily port existing inference pipelines, create new pipelines, and optimize code.
Model support has been a limiting factor for many customers and silicon providers. Last week, Axelera disclosed its novel approach, and first of it’s kind model compilation, AxeleraScript (AxScript). You can learn more about AxScript in our blog.
See Axelera's Europa and Voyager Toolchain at AI Infra Summit
Fabrizio Del Maffeo will discuss the infrastructure shifts driving the next phase of enterprise and Physical AI during his keynote, “The Physical AI Inflection Point: Industry Shifts, Adoption Barriers, and the Infrastructure Imperative,” on September 15 from 11:00–11:20 a.m. at AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara. Attendees can also see Europa in action and meet with Axelera AI at booth 930.
Learn more about Europa products here.
About Axelera AI
Axelera AI is a European AI semiconductor company developing next-generation AI acceleration hardware for edge computing and data center applications. With an edge-first architecture that addresses AI’s critical energy and cooling constraints, Axelera AI has deployed across more than 600 customers including in telecommunications, aerospace, and enterprise sectors. The company’s Europa and Metis platforms deliver high-performance AI inference solutions that enable deployment at scale within real-world power and thermal budgets. Through its Partner Accelerator Network and Voyager SDK, Axelera AI provides a comprehensive ecosystem approach that ensures accessibility and rapid deployment.
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Matt Stubbs
Voxus PR
“The METIS AI processor from Axelera with its powerful capabilities to process video data as well as LLM at highest power efficiency fits perfectly to our needs for embedded AI solutions for on-board aircraft cabin electronics. As a European company we are keen to work with European solutions, and we are excited to explore the next Axelera architecture generation EUROPA.” European Leading Aircraft Manufacturer
“AI has become strategic infrastructure, and building it on an open ecosystem is how we keep innovation moving. Axelera shares that conviction with OVHcloud, and its Europa-based products bring the energy efficiency and inference performance our customers need across our public and private cloud. This partnership is a step towards sovereignty that customers can actually rely on, from the accelerator in the server to the datacentre around it to the models they run on top.” Miroslaw Klaba, VP R&D, OVHcloud
“E4 Computer Engineering is widely renown as being leader on integrating the latest technology solutions and enjoys a tight collaboration with AXELERA in EuroHPC projects as well as in high level business opportunities. We are testing Metis from Axelera AI and are very impressed with its capabilities as well as of the support provided by the Voyager SDK. We firmly believe that the next solution, Europa, offers a leap in performance and functionalities such that data centers will more efficiently support the needs of their customers and we are eager to integrate this new solution into our ecosystem and further expand our relationship. Cosimo D. Gianfreda, CEO and Co-Founder at E4.
"Our optronic applications demand real inference performance at the edge, within the power constraints that embedded systems impose. Axelera's Metis technology provides the performance and efficiency we need, while Europa is opening the door to a broader range of general-purpose Al inference workloads requiring significantly more compute capability. What also drew us to Axelera is its European technology foundation. At Safran, supply-chain resilience and access to sovereign European technologies are central to our long-term thinking." Jean-Christophe Jammes, R&T Program Manager at Safran
“At 2CRSi, performance and energy efficiency have never been a trade-off; delivering both is an engineering commitment. Integrating Axelera AI's full AIPU lineup, from Metis to the new Europa, into the servers we build in Europe is a natural step: from the edge to the data center, we provide the hardware backbone that turns European silicon into deployable AI infrastructure. This is European industrial cooperation at its best, two champions, each playing to its strengths, opening doors neither could open alone.” Alain Wilmouth, President & CEO of 2CRSi
“Axelera's 1st generation product, the Metis™ AIPU, already delivers impressive performance metrics, underscoring the reliability and quality of Axelera’s solutions. These are particularly relevant for edge computers and high-performance systems in rail technology that are specifically designed for AI applications. We look forward to working with Axelera to develop production-ready computing products based on the new generation of AIPUs and to offer them to our customers soon.” Alexander von Allmen, Senior Vice President of Engineering & Products and Member of the Executive Board at duagon (member of Knorr-Bremse)
“Our collaboration with Axelera AI, from our KLARQ autonomous robotics demonstrator featuring Metis AIPU through to Europa, shows that security and performance no longer need to be a trade-off. By combining Axelera’s European AI innovation with Kudelski Labs' hardware-rooted trust layer, our partnership is helping manufacturers deploy Edge AI with confidence, while strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty." Christophe Nicolas, SVP Kudelski Labs
“iOKOS Zrt. builds the Intelligent Energy Node Network and develops Artificial Sustainable Intelligence: AI that measures its own carbon footprint and the carbon handprint it creates, instead of estimating either. Axelera's Metis handles edge inference in the node, Europa the on-premise near-edge tier. Together they form one distributed, cost-balanced fabric: each workload lands where latency and price per inference say it should, and nothing leaves the site. Within a building- or cluster-cabinet power budget, Axelera's performance per watt is outstanding — and at the edge, power draw is what dominates opex, so total cost of ownership scales with the fleet instead of working only at a single site. That, and their position at the heart of Europe's semiconductor ecosystem, makes them a critical partner for us.” Tamás CS.NAGY, Chief Executive Officer, iOKOS
“We built Xference to give organisations real control over how and where their AI runs, not just their data, but their costs and their infrastructure choices too. Partnering with Axelera lets us put a fully European stack, from chip to inference orchestration, to a real test: can it compete on performance while keeping that control where it belongs, with our customers, rather than with a handful of non-European suppliers.” Andrea Pili, Founder, Xference
"Equipping our harvesting robots with the Metis M.2 card provides 214 TOPS@INT8 of edge NPU performance. This allows us to process 6 camera streams in real time for precise AI segmentation directly in the field."
Dr. Walter Wohlkinger, CEO, Robokraft
"Our customers want everything...A cloud AI service gives them without their data ever leaving the building. That is the whole reason DevRaQ exists — every layer runs on our own infrastructure, so nothing gets handed to a third-party AI service. Axelera's performance per watt is what lets us put that much inference inside a single chassis, and we're proud to be an Early Access Program partner for Europa. It's the accelerator we're designing our next generation of private AI appliances around.” Raja Ramkaran Reddy Rudravaram, Chief Architect & Co-Founder, ThinkCloud Inc./RCV Innovations Pvt Ltd
“On the factory floors we serve, putting vision analytics on every camera lane cut safety violations by 28% and defect detections to be caught earlier in the manufacturing cycle. The harder problem was making it repeatable — turning one proven deployment into a product any customer can buy and run. Axelera brought the total cost of ownership down far enough for that to work, at the performance the workload demands, which is why the same platform now travels from India into the markets we are expanding into. Europa is the next step — headroom to run heavier models on the same footprint as those deployments grow.” Kannan Srinivasagam, CEO, WG Tech Solutions
"At Synteza, we develop AI-powered autonomy solutions for unmanned systems, with a strong focus on efficient edge computing. We recently started testing Axelera AI's Metis chip and see good potential for our use cases. We also appreciate Axelera's hands-on, startup-friendly approach to working with partners. It's encouraging to see advanced AI computing technology being developed in Europe, by a European company." Serhii Lubkin, CEO Synteza
“At NeuralSat, we’ve been impressed by the power and efficiency of Axelera AI’s chips. We’re excited to test their hardware in orbit and help bring European AI technology to space.” - Bilal Mohd, Co-Founder & CEO, NeuralSat GmbH
"Aether Infrastructures is a network of European AI Factories — owned by Europeans, built for Europeans. Our principle is straightforward: pick the best Europe has to offer at every technology layer. Axelera is exactly that. Their Europa chips are high-performing, European by design, and fully aligned with Europe's strategic goals. Inside Aether's infrastructure, our clients get full, unrestricted access to everything Europa chips can perform — AI inference at its best, image, video and agentic AI — from defense to aerospace, with the highest power efficiency for more sustainable compute. Their latest Europa chip is just the beginning. Our goal is to make Aether the backbone of a sovereign European AI ecosystem — and we're calling on every European tech champion to be part of it." Joseph GONNACHON, Aether Consortium Director
"Running language models at the edge and in AI factories has always meant a trade-off between capability and power. Europa changes that equation. Combined with CompactifAI, our compression technology, Europa lets customers run compressed LLMs at a fraction of the energy of GPU-based alternatives - without giving up accuracy. For industries that need private, always-on AI for their most demanding LLM workloads, that combination of efficiency and performance is exactly what has been missing. We're proud to partner with Axelera to bring it to market." Rodrigo Hernandez - Global Director of Generative AI, Multiverse Computing
"New silicon usually costs months of work before running a real workload. ZML eliminates that tax. We compile directly to Axelera's Europa architecture from the same codebase we run everywhere else. Nothing left to rewrite and power-efficient high-performance inference reaches production. On day one." Steeve Morin, Founder, ZML
"The arrival of Europa is an important milestone for Europe’s AI infrastructure ecosystem. OpenNebula is proud to be working with Axelera AI to integrate Europa into an open, sovereign cloud platform that enables AI accelerators to be consumed as a service. Together, we are delivering the end-to-end software and hardware stack required by
Europe’s AI Factories, making it easier to deploy, operate, and scale trusted AI infrastructure built on European technology. We look forward to supporting AI Factories across the EuroHPC ecosystem as they bring this new generation of European AI computing to production.” Dr. Alberto P. Martí, Director for Strategic Alliances at OpenNebula Systems
"The next generation of AI infrastructure should be built so that chips and intelligence co-evolve. Axelera's new Europa-based products gives us powerful and high-efficiency inference silicon to design against, and combining it with our heterogeneous orchestration technology, enables customers to achieve significant improvements in capability, energy efficiency and TCO". Jascha Achterberg, co-founder, Callosum
"Digica deployed our performance optimised CV models to Axelera's Metis platform in H1 2026; the power of Axelera's devices opens up a range of new use cases for our software. We look forward to the launch of Europa, which we expect will further enhance our work in the medical, agriculture and space sectors." Jim Carroll, CTO of Digica
“Trusted AI at the edge requires more than processing power. It requires confidence in where data comes from, which devices can be trusted and that the AI models themselves remain protected. By combining Axelera AI’s edge AI technology with SandGrain’s hardware-anchored trust, we see a strong opportunity to advance secure, trusted edge AI — built on European technology and ready for demanding real-world environments.” Charles Smit, CEO, SandGrain
"We've worked closely with Axelera to make sure every YOLO model runs natively on Metis, and we're excited to take that collaboration to the next level with Europa." Craig Johnston, VP of Sales & Customer Success, Ultralytics
"Merging sovereign technologies: Axelera's hardware with our Phoenix-RTOS operating system creates immense value for the European economy. Together, we are pushing the boundaries of AI-driven Edge-ioT devices of the future, powering next-generation drones and NewSpace satellites." Paweł Pisarczyk, CEO, Phoenix RTOS
"Axelera shares our commitment to fully EU-sovereign infrastructure, and to efficient inference at a lower, more predictable cost. We're excited to be among the first to test their next-generation Europa silicon." Ivo Teel, CEO, i3D.net
“At Intozi, we’ve always believed that the real value of Vision AI is unlocked at the edge, where decisions need to happen in real time, at scale. Axelera gives us the hardware foundation to deliver exactly that. This partnership marks a significant step in our mission to make intelligent video analytics accessible, efficient, and scalable for every deployment, everywhere.” Virender Josan, Founder & MD, Intozi Tech Pvt. Ltd.
"Axelera has been an engineering partner rather than a supplier — our teams have built, tested, and shipped together, and that shows up in what customers receive. When you are asking an industrial operator to put AI into a live production environment, that kind of partnership is what earns the deployment. Europa is the next step of it." Ruchir Kakkad, Co-Founder, WebOccult Technologies
We build evidence-grade AI for regulated industries, where every output has to be defensible, and most of our customers cannot send their data anywhere at all. That pushes the whole pipeline on-premises, training and inference alike, and on-premises, power, cost, and footprint decide what is actually possible. We train small language models on the customer's own data, then run document intelligence and compliance workflows against them locally, with Axelera making that practical at a cost that works. Europa opens the door to larger models without changing the deployment model." Ankit Goyanka, Founder and CEO, Predusk Technology
"Spanidea takes customers from idea to implementation, bringing solutions to life, from hardware design and platform software to AI models, system integration, and deployment. We bring together end-to-end engineering expertise to deliver complete solutions across industrial, healthcare, security, and other markets. Axelera gives us a high-performance AI platform to build on and Europa further expands what our customers can run efficiently on a single edge device." Bhagirath Choudhary, CEO – Spanidea
“Our hands-on work with Axelera AI's Metis AIPU and Voyager SDK demonstrated how efficiently edge AI concepts can progress from initial bring-up to working demonstrations. The combination of high-efficiency inference hardware, a mature and practical SDK and a well-defined deployment flow makes Axelera a compelling platform for building production-grade AI applications. As Europa extends this architecture to more demanding workloads, we look forward to deepening our collaboration and to exploring what this next generation of AI acceleration can unlock for our customers.” Andrei Filimon - Technical Director R&D Embedded & Automotive, rinf.tech
“Working with Axelera AI and the Metis platform has shown us how much can be achieved with high-performance edge AI in practical, real-world scenarios. What we particularly value is the combination of strong performance with the ability to run AI independently of the cloud, as well as the opportunity to work with a technology provider based in Europe. We’re looking forward to continuing our collaboration and seeing what we can build together with Europa.” Denis Stoliar, Deputy Head of Business Development, Innowise