Axelera AI, the Dutch provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology, has announced Europa – an AI processor unit (AIPU) that claims to set 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 suitable for compute-intensive, multi-modal AI inference applications from the edge to enterprise servers.
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 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 claims to deliver 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 claiming to deliver best-in-class performance for generative AI solutions.
“Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between the raw computepower they want and the real-world usability they need,” says Axelera CEO Fabrizio del Maffeo (pictured holding Europa), “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.
Axelera optimized Europa to simplify design integration and support deployment flexibility. Specifically:
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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.
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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.
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 H1 2026.
