Axelera AI targets IPO within three to five years. The next step is about commercial execution: turning customers' initial deployments into repeat orders. Published on October 4, 2026 Fabrizio del Maffeo, (C) Axelera AI Team IO+ selects and features the most important news stories on innovation and technology, carefully curated by its editors. The Eindhoven-based AI chip company wants to become a global player. CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo believes an IPO in North America could be achievable in three years. Expansion in Japan is intended to contribute to that growth. Axelera AI has its sights set on the stock market. In an interview with Japan's Gesher Times, co-founder and CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo outlines his goal of an IPO in North America within three to five years. He believes three years could be possible. That sets an ambitious timeline for the company, founded in Eindhoven in 2021. He does not specify a listing date or stock exchange. From growth capital to commercial growth. Axelera now has a solid financial foundation to support its international ambitions. In February, the company raised more than $250 million in a funding round led by Innovation Industries. Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and SiteGround Capital also participated. Since its founding, Axelera has attracted more than $450 million through equity, grants and debt. The money is being used to scale production, expand the partner network and further develop software for customers. In September, Axelera reported that more than 600 customers worldwide were deploying its products. With the introduction of its new Europa platform and systems from companies including Dell and Supermicro, it also aims to serve more demanding enterprise applications. The next step towards an IPO is therefore about commercial execution: turning customers' initial deployments into larger, repeat orders. For a chip company with ambitions like these, what ultimately matters is how convincingly it can turn its technology into a business capable of sustained growth. Japan as a growth market. Japan plays an important role in that strategy. Del Maffeo is targeting $100 million in revenue there within five years. The country has strong robotics and factory automation industries, precisely the applications Axelera focuses on. Through a partnership with electronics distributor Marubun, the company aims to expand its access to the Japanese market. Marubun provides more than sales channels. The partner also supports customers with the technical implementation of Axelera's products. That should make the transition from interest to actual use easier. A European alternative with global ambitions. The promise to customers is simple: run AI applications at lower cost and with less energy consumption. Axelera develops chips that run trained AI models, for example in robots, cameras and industrial systems. The company positions itself as an alternative to established suppliers such as Nvidia. Del Maffeo is already looking beyond the IPO. He sees the potential for Axelera to grow into a company with a market capitalisation of $100 billion to $200 billion within ten years. That ambition makes the next three years pivotal. International expansion, new products and investors give Axelera room to grow. The challenge now is to make the most of that opportunity and build a company that can also earn investors' confidence on the stock market.

Axelera AI launches Europa: Delivers Physical and Enterprise AI through growing Partner Ecosystem including Dell and Supermicro. Purpose-built inference accelerator with robust software toolchain gives enterprises greater control over where and how AI runs, where data goes and what it costs. Axelera AI, an European player 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. 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, GM, 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, 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 2CRSi, 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). Read also: With Axelera Metis AIPU integrated into ASRock platform Delivers 629 TOPs processing power for multi-modal AI applications from the edge to the data center

ASRock Industrial collaborates with Axelera AI to accelerate Edge AI inference deployment. With Axelera Metis AIPU integrated into ASRock platform. ASRock Industrial announced a strategic collaboration with Axelera AI to deliver high-performance, power-efficient, and cost-effective AI inference solutions for edge computing.The collaboration integrates Axelera Metis AIPU cards into ASRock Industrial's edge AI platforms, delivering a compact, scalable AI inference solution optimized for real-world edge environments. The solution enables parallel AI processing by extending the system's native AI computing capabilities with up to 214 TOPS of additional inference through the Metis M.2 or PCIe AI acceleration cards. Powered by Metis AIPU, it delivers superior performance while significantly lowering power consumption and TCO compared with conventional GPU-based architectures. Designed for edge AI applications including LLM, machine vision inspection, robotics, smart retail and city environments, the solution enables organizations to deploy advanced AI workloads where data is generated while minimizing the system footprint, power requirements, and infrastructure costs. Validated Edge AI Platforms Accelerate Deployment These validated configurations provide customers with a scalable path to deploying advanced AI capabilities on compact edge systems. On ASRock Industrial's expandable Edge AIoT platforms, including the iEPF-11000S, iEPF-10000S, iEPF-9500S, iEPF-9040S, and iEPF-9040VS series, the Axelera Metis PCIe card enables scalable, industrial-grade AI processing for demanding edge applications. For compact edge systems such as the AI BOX-A395, NUC BOX-358H, NUC BOX-255H, and NUC BOX-155H, the Axelera Metis M.2 card delivers high-performance AI inference in a compact, power-efficient form factor. Supporting multiple AI workloads running in parallel, these solutions enable real-time analysis for machine vision, robotics, retail and hospitality, warehouse automation, smart surveillance, and intelligent transportation. "Organizations are looking for practical ways to scale AI beyond proof-of-concept projects," said James Lee, chairman, ASRock Industrial. "By combining Axelera AI Metis AIPU cards with ASRock Industrial's edge computing platforms, we provide customers with greater flexibility to deploy AI where it delivers the most value. This collaboration expands the range of AI solutions available for industrial and enterprise environments while simplifying the path from development to deployment." "Advanced AI shouldn't require oversized systems or power budgets most environments can't support," said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder, Axelera AI. "Our collaboration with ASRock Industrial pairs Axelera's high-performance AIPUs with proven industrial computing platforms, giving customers a practical way to run demanding AI workloads within the constraints their systems must work within." As demand for edge AI continues to grow, ASRock Industrial and Axelera AI are committed to delivering solutions that make advanced AI more accessible across edge environments. By combining compact, high-performance AI acceleration with proven edge computing platforms, the collaboration enables organizations to deploy AI workloads more efficiently and unlock new opportunities for intelligent automation, machine vision, and real-time decision-making at the edge. To simplify platform selection and accelerate AI deployment, ASRock Industrial continues expanding its AI Pathfinder tool with validated hardware recommendations, integrating accelerator cards, GPUs, and optimized platform configurations tailored for diverse AI workloads and deployment scenarios. Through AI Pathfinder, customers can more efficiently identify recommended Edge AI systems and accelerate deployment decisions with confidence. Read also: Delivers 629 TOPs processing power for multi-modal AI applications from the edge to the data center With ZutaCore HyperCool waterless direct liquid cooling (DLC)