European AI processor developer secures €40m for manufacturing

VSORA SA has secured a significant funding of €40 million (approximately US$46 million) to facilitate the production of an AI inference processor on a 5nm scale with TSMC by 2025. The funding round was spearheaded by Otium and the office of an undisclosed affluent French family. Omnes Capital and Adélie Capital also contributed to the funding, with additional support from the European Innovation Council (EIC) fund.

Established in 2015 by CEO Khaled Maalej, VSORA, based in Paris, France, focuses on developing DSP IP cores tailored for chipmakers supporting digital communication systems like 5G.

The latest funding injection is aimed at bolstering the Jotunn 8 (J8) processor, which VSORA claims will offer three times the performance of existing AI inference processors while consuming only half the power. Although the specific AI inference processor used for benchmarking remains undisclosed, Maalej mentioned in a LinkedIn post that the J8 chip can deliver 3,200 teraflops, equivalent to top-tier chips, while consuming less than half the power.

According to information shared with eeNews Europe via email, VSORA stated that the performance claims are based on published MLPerf 4.0 data center inference data when implementing the Llama2-70B LLM.

“This funding marks a pivotal moment for VSORA as we accelerate our mission to revolutionize AI chips and ensure Europe’s technological sovereignty in AI computing,” said Maalej in a statement.

When operating on tensor cores, the J8 achieves 800 TFLOPS using an FP16 datatype and 3200 TFLOPS with an FP32 datatype. The design is host processor agnostic and includes RISC-V cores for on-chip AI processing. The component is tailored for 288Gbytes of HBM3e stacked DRAM with a throughput of 8Tbytes per second.

The J8 AI processor features a proprietary software development platform that utilizes standard high-level entry points like ONNX, Pytorch, and others, along with a dedicated LLVM compiler. Jan Pantzar, the vice president of sales and marketing at VSORA, highlighted that this approach aligns with the current market leader, making it seamless to port existing algorithms to VSORA hardware.

In a separate development, in 2023, VSORA unveiled the Jotunn 4 chiplet-based design without disclosing the manufacturing process targeted. The company also announced €13 million in funding allocated for the development phase of the project.

Furthermore, in January 2022, VSORA introduced the Tyr series of chips tailored for autonomous driving applications, with plans for sampling in the fourth quarter of 2022 and availability in vehicles by 2024.