French chip designer SiPearl has closed a €130 million ($152m) Series A financing round, having raised €32m ($38m) in a third and final tranche.

The €32m raise saw participation from existing investors, European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and the French State, via French Tech Souveraineté, and new investor Cathay Venture.

The company said the round is the largest Series A in the European fabless semiconductor industry, and it is now preparing the launch of a Series B round.

Launched in 2020 under the European Processor Initiative (EPI), SiPearl has developed the Rhea1 processor, an Arm-based CPU designed to power supercomputers.

SiPearl completed the tape out Rhea1 “several weeks ago,” and it has now been handed over to TSMC to start the manufacturing process. The processor will be available for sampling in early 2026, the company said.

Made using TSMC’s 6nm N6 process, the chip features 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, with each core comprising two 256-bit Scalable Vector Extensions, which the company says will optimize area and energy use.

The processor also has four stacks of HBM2E (High Bandwidth Memory) to support high-performance computing, big data, and AI inferencing applications; and four DDR5 interfaces, supporting 2 DIMMs (Dual In-Line Memory Modules) per channel.

Rhea1 will power the CPU cluster of the Jupiter supercomputer, currently being built at Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich campus. Set to become the first EuroHPC exascale supercomputer, Jupiter Booster, a partial version of the larger supercomputer, ranked fourth on the most recent edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

“Sovereign hardware is mandatory to ensure Europe’s independence and sovereignty in AI and strategic fields such as security and defence,” said Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl. “With the tape-out of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, we are showing that Europe now has a competitor capable of challenging non-European leaders.”

He added: “Because Europe needs strong and independent partners in the global semiconductor ecosystem, we have chosen to forge closer ties with Taiwan, a country at the forefront of this industry worldwide. We would like to thank the investors who have placed their trust in us and who support us in this endeavor.”