Does this technology have a geopolitical role to play?

Faced with the magnitude of the current geopolitical challenges, a real global technological race is underway to develop the all-important core of supercomputers: high-performance microprocessors. Today, the market is dominated by the United States which produces almost all the microprocessors intended for these supercomputers. While it consumes more than a third of the world’s high-performance computing power, Europe produces less than 5% of the resources supplying it and to date not a single European supercomputer is powered by a European microprocessor. Fortunately, the situation is now changing.

Indeed, you are supported by Europe. How can this technology contribute to European independence?

The European Union has understood the need to have its own supercomputing capacity. In 2018, Europe launched the EuroHPC programme (Enterprise for European High Performance Computing), with the aim to deploy world class supercomputing infrastructure in Europe, with a budget of 8 billion euros. Since then, a real revolution has been underway in the European supercomputer ecosystem, with it now possessing two out of the four most powerful supercomputers in the world: Lumi in Finland and Leonardo in Italy. And soon, Rhea, our high-performance, low-power microprocessor will be equipping European supercomputers.

In what way is this a significant innovation?

In addition to remarkable computing power (equivalent to more than two million laptops’ worth), this 70 millimetre by 70 millimetre microprocessor is less energy-consuming. This makes it possible to halve the energy consumption for the same equivalent computing power. Our microprocessor is made up of around sixty high-performance computing cores. The closer the memory cores are to the computing cores, the faster the data travels and so the less energy you consume. This performance was possible thanks to Arm, our technology partner. Another key advantage of Rhea is its ability to work with any third-party accelerator, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), chips specialised in artificial intelligence or even quantum accelerators.

You have just entered a new development stage...

Indeed, our innovation activity requires years of R&D and a budget of approximately 150 million euros. This is why, in April 2023, we carried out a fund-raiser. This will facilitate the marketing of Rhea to equip the first European supercomputers in early 2024. These funds will allow us to start the production of our microprocessor in the TMSC factory in Taiwan, because its production costs will be considerable. TMSC accounts for 80% of the world’s microprocessor manufacturing capacity and to date only TMSC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea have mastered the finesse of the Rhea 6 nanometre engraving process.

The sector as a whole is facing a shortage of engineers: is this a concern for you?

This fundraising round will allow us to grow, going from 130 employees today to 1,000 by the end of 2025. This is certainly a major challenge in the current context of a shortage of engineers, particularly in semiconductors. To convince people to join us, we have solid strengths: our R&D sites are located in France, Germany and Spain, thus offering a wide choice of workplaces. Our project represents the opportunity to participate in a strategic project for an independent Europe. I am convinced that the prospect of individually contributing to the development of meaningful technology is a real recruitment engine, especially for young people. It is a technology that will bring major environmental, social and societal benefits, like improving health, designing a more powerful and fairer artificial intelligence or even preventing weather risks.

And what about the future?

We are happy to be one of the major players in the emergence of a real European microprocessor industry, with job creation and technology that is 100% under control. After the commercialisation of Rhea in 2024 on the EuroHPC market and then worldwide, our ambition is to develop a whole range of microprocessors to eventually become the benchmark for complex digital components in Europe.