While the Netherlands is drowning in network congestion, Axelera AI is developing chips that render the cloud obsolete

The conventional solution is to build more. Larger server farms, more capacity, more cooling. But at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, a team of two hundred people is working on a fundamentally different route. Axelera AI shifts intelligence from the cloud to where data actually originates. In cameras, robots, cars, medical devices. They call it the edge.

An Italian Learning to Build Chips

Fabrizio Del Maffeo is an engineer, Italian, and lives in the Netherlands. He worked for many years at the ASUS computing group, where he sold and developed IoT hardware. There he noticed something that he couldn't shake off. Customers increasingly asked for devices that could think for themselves, without a constant connection to a data center. But the chips he could supply weren't made for that.

"Honestly, I had no idea how to solve it because I always bought computer hardware," Del Maffeo says in a podcast. [3] It took him two years to assemble a team. Scientists from IBM Research in Zurich, imec in Belgium, ETH Zurich. In July 2021, Axelera AI started. Three years later, they have raised over 200 million euros and supply chips to customers in fifteen countries. [4]

The Wall Where Data Hits a Dead End

The technical breakthrough lies in a concept that sounds like a contradiction. In-memory computing. In traditional chips, computations are performed in one place and data is stored in another. That means constant transport between processor and memory. This movement costs time and energy. In the chip sector, this is called the memory wall, the invisible wall where performance is stalled.

Axelera's approach is different. Their chips perform calculations where the data already resides. No endless back-and-forth. The result is a chip that, according to the company, is up to ten times more energy-efficient than the competition, at a fraction of the cost. [5]

"You can't imagine a car driving in a tunnel, unable to connect to the cloud, yet having to make a decision. You need intelligence that operates without connectivity." — Fabrizio Del Maffeo [3]

A Billion Cameras That Can Become Smart

The market strategy is pragmatic. There are over a billion security cameras worldwide. You don't just replace them. But you can place a smart box next to them. A box with an Axelera chip that analyzes footage locally and only sends relevant information. They call it retrofit.

Del Maffeo sees applications everywhere. Cameras in stores that not only monitor but also analyze which products customers view. Medical devices that perform preventive checks at the general practitioner's instead of in the hospital. Robots with a brain in their own body, not somewhere in a data center hundreds of kilometers away.

"The next big wave is AI at the edge, in the physical world. We believe that as technology matures, it tends to decentralize." — Fabrizio Del Maffeo [3]

The Question Everyone Asks

At the Supercomputing conference in 2024, one question loomed. Is there an alternative to Nvidia? The American company dominates the AI chip market, especially for training models. But Axelera focuses on another segment. Inference, executing trained models, requires different hardware. Less brute force, more efficiency.

The validation comes from an unexpected corner. In March 2025, Axelera received 61.6 million euros from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for the development of Titania, a chiplet platform for high-performance computing. [6] The grant fits within a broader European ambition for digital sovereignty. RISC-V, the open-source architecture that Axelera uses, makes the continent less dependent on American and Chinese chip giants.

The choice for Eindhoven is no coincidence. ASML is nearby. Philips has its roots there. The entire ecosystem of suppliers, knowledge institutions, and talent is within reach. Axelera does not build in Silicon Valley. They build where the lithography machines that make the entire chip industry possible come from.

A Lesson in Infrastructure

For the Dutch AI scene, there's a lesson in this story. Not every breakthrough is in the application layer, in the chatbots and generative tools that grab headlines. Sometimes the biggest opportunity lies in the underlying infrastructure. The chips, the hardware, the foundations on which everything runs.

Axelera also demonstrates that EU funding can support serious growth. More than 60 million euros for one project is not a sideshow. And it proves that deep tech is possible in the Netherlands, provided you find the right partners and have the patience to build a team for two years before you even make one chip.

The remaining question is whether Europe can scale quickly enough. Chip manufacturing requires astronomical amounts. Nvidia invests billions per quarter. But in a world where the power grid is full and data centers are reaching limits, efficiency suddenly has strategic value. And that is precisely what Axelera is betting on.

Willem Blom
Founder Dutchstartup.ai