Openchip unveils BER10: Europe’s new sovereign chip is here

Openchip’s BER10, designed in Europe on open standards, so that Europe can decide its own digital future.

Barcelona – August 17, 2026 – Today, Openchip is introducing BER10, a sovereign chip built to give Europe’s most critical sectors control over the technology their most sensitive data runs on. It is built on one of the world’s most advanced manufacturing process and delivered in just 2.5 years. Openchip began with no team and built, from scratch, all the engineering talent and expertise needed to design and deliver it; from empty offices to finished silicon in hand. And this is no academic prototype: BER10 is industrial-grade silicon, ready to run real workloads today as a genuine alternative for Europe, and available to partners as a platform to build and validate on. This achievement has been possible thanks to the talent assembled here in Europe and to strategic alliances built on production-ready technologies, which let us reach a high technology-readiness level in a short time. We’re grateful to the partners who helped us get here.

For decades, the most advanced computing technology in the world has been designed elsewhere, controlled elsewhere and licensed on someone else’s terms. Every hospital, bank, factory, and public institution in Europe that wants to run modern, AI-powered workloads has had to build on foundations it doesn’t own and can’t fully inspect. BER10 is a first, concrete step toward changing that.

BER10 is built on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture, owned by no single company or country. That openness is foundational: it means Europe doesn’t need permission to build its own processors, doesn’t need to trust a black box, and can shape its own roadmap for the compute that will power its economy, its research, and its most sensitive data. This is what technological sovereignty actually looks like: the ability to design, verify, and control the silicon your society depends on.

That matters most where trust matters most. As banks, healthcare providers and public services move more of their operations to AI and cloud infrastructure, the question of who can see your data, and whose hardware it runs on, stops being a technical detail and becomes a question of privacy, security, and autonomy for every citizen. Compute built in Europe, on open standards, verifiable from the ground up, is a foundation for keeping that data where it belongs.

We started building Openchip from scratch in early 2024: teams, tools, IPs, vision. In 2025 we taped out this first chip and now, we’re holding that first silicon in our hands: designed to be fully functional, Linux-capable 64-bit processor, leveraging leading edge sub-2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process technology, the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology available today.

“When we started Openchip, the goal was never just to build a chip, but to prove that Europe can design and deliver world-class silicon on open standards, on its own terms,” said Cesc Guim, CEO of Openchip. “BER10 is that proof, made real. It’s a foundation for the digital sovereignty Europe needs, built on a more open and resilient value chain that ultimately benefits the global technology industry.”

This isn’t a lab curiosity or a research demonstrator. BER10 is silicon built on the same industrial-grade process as the processors already running the world’s data centers and critical infrastructure today. It boots real operating systems and runs real software. Europe doesn’t just need proof that sovereign, open-standard compute is possible; it needs compute it can put to work, on real workloads, today. BER10 is that.

What BER10 actually does

BER10 is a compact but genuinely powerful processor. It has four high-performance CPU cores capable of running a full Linux operating system, the same software foundation used in data centers and cloud servers everywhere. Each core can execute multiple instructions out of order and in parallel, a technique that lets the chip work faster by not waiting idly for slower operations to finish.

It also includes a wide vector processing unit, a component purpose-built for handling many calculations at once: the kind of math-heavy work that underpins AI, image processing, and scientific computing, and is combined with fast, multi-channel memory and high-speed connections (PCIe and AXI, the same kind of high-bandwidth links used to connect components inside servers and data centers).

“BER10 confirms that 2026 is the year of highly powerful RISC-V application processor silicon and that RISC-V has already moved beyond experimentation into high-performing industrial-grade, real-world computing,” said Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International. “Seeing a European team deliver Linux-capable silicon of this calibre reflects the momentum we’re witnessing across the ecosystem worldwide, and it’s exactly the kind of innovation an open standard is meant to enable.”

BER10 is the first step, and it is a step taken at full stride. It proves that a European team can design and deliver advanced, open-standard, application-grade silicon on the world’s leading manufacturing technology. It also paves the way for Openchip’s next generation of RISC-V compute accelerators, built for supercomputing and AI at data center scale.

Designed and developed in Europe alongside a strong ecosystem of partners, these devices and their software offer the efficient performance, sovereignty, and security that data centres, enterprises, and critical infrastructure depend on: the infrastructure Europe will need to run its own AI on its own terms, and to compete and contribute as a serious player in the global compute market. This BER10 chip is a key milestone in Openchip’s and Europe’s journey towards digital sovereignty. This is only the beginning.

Now Openchip is focused on its first data-center product, built on the core blocks proven in BER10. The company continues to work closely with strategic partners to bring that product to market as quickly as possible, while conducting longer-term pathfinding research with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to shape its technology roadmap.

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