Openchip unveils BER10, a sovereign chip designed to give Europe’s most critical sectors control over the technology that runs their most sensitive data. It is manufactured using one of the world’s most advanced fabrication processes and has been developed in just 2.5 years. Openchip started with no team and built, from scratch, all the engineering talent and capabilities needed to design it and bring it to life; from empty offices to having the silicon finished in their hands.
And this isn’t an academic prototype: BER10 is an industrial-grade chip, ready to run real workloads today as a tangible alternative for Europe and available for partners to develop and validate their solutions on this platform. This achievement has been possible thanks to the talent gathered here, in Europe, and to strategic alliances built on production-ready technologies, which have allowed us to reach a high level of technological maturity in a short period of time.
For decades, the world’s most advanced computing technology has been designed elsewhere, controlled elsewhere, and licensed under third-party terms. All hospitals, banks, factories, and public institutions in Europe that have sought to run AI-powered modern workloads have had to build on a foundation they do not own and cannot fully inspect. BER10 represents a concrete first step toward changing that reality.
Open Architecture
BER10 is based on RISC-V, an open instruction-set architecture that belongs to no company or country. That openness is fundamental: it means Europe does not need permission to develop its own processors, does not need to rely on a black box, and can define its own roadmap for the computing capacity that will power its economy, its research, and its most sensitive data. This is what technological sovereignty really means: the ability to design, verify, and control the silicon on which our society depends.
As banks, healthcare providers, and utilities move more operations to AI and cloud infrastructures, the question of who can access the data and on what hardware it runs ceases to be a technical detail and becomes a matter of privacy, security, and autonomy for all citizens. An infrastructure of computing developed in Europe, based on open standards and verifiable from its foundations, is the basis for ensuring that those data stay where they should be.
We began building Openchip from scratch in early 2024: teams, tooling, intellectual property and a vision. In 2025 we completed the tape-out of this first chip, and today we have that first silicon in our hands: a 64-bit processor, fully functional and capable of running Linux, developed using cutting-edge Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology below 2 nm, the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology available today.
“When we launched Openchip, the goal was never merely to build a chip, but to prove that Europe can design and develop world-class silicon based on open standards and on its own terms,” says Cesc Guim, CEO of Openchip. “BER10 is the reality-made proof. It’s the foundation of the digital sovereignty Europe needs, built on a more open and resilient value chain that, in the end, benefits the entire global tech industry.”
This isn’t laboratory curiosity or a research demonstrator. BER10 is a chip manufactured with the same industrial-grade process used by processors powering data centers and critical infrastructures worldwide. It boots real operating systems and runs real software. Europe doesn’t just need to show that sovereign, open-standards computing is possible; it needs computing capacity that can start working on real workloads today. BER10 is exactly that.
What BER10 Really Does
BER10 is a compact yet genuinely powerful processor. It packs four high-performance CPU cores capable of running a full Linux operating system—the same software base used in data centers and cloud servers around the world. Each core can execute multiple out-of-order instructions in parallel, a technique that lets the chip go faster by not waiting for the slower operations to finish.
It also includes a broad vector-processing unit, a component designed specifically to perform a large number of calculations simultaneously: the kind of math-intensive operations that underpin artificial intelligence, image processing, and scientific computing. All of this is combined with fast multi-channel memory and high-speed interconnects (PCIe and AXI—the same high-bandwidth links used to connect components inside servers and data centers).
“BER10 confirms that 2026 is the year of RISC-V silicon for high-performance application processors and that RISC-V has already moved beyond the experimental phase to become a high-performance industrial computing technology ready for real-world applications,” says Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International. “Seeing a European team develop a chip capable of running Linux with this level of quality reflects the momentum we’re witnessing across the global ecosystem and represents exactly the kind of innovation an open standard is meant to enable.”
BER10 is the first step, and it is a step taken with resolve. It proves that a European team can design and develop advanced silicon, based on open standards and prepared for real-world applications using the world’s most advanced manufacturing technology. It also paves the way for the next generation of Openchip’s RISC-V accelerators, designed for data-center-scale supercomputing and AI.
Designed and developed in Europe, alongside a robust ecosystem of partners, these devices and their software deliver the efficient performance, sovereignty, and security that data centers, businesses, and critical infrastructures rely on—the infrastructure Europe will need to run its own AI on its own terms and compete and contribute as a major player in the global computing market. This BER10 chip marks a key milestone on Openchip’s and Europe’s path to digital sovereignty. This is only the beginning.
