Earlier this summer, the above photograph of Openchip CEO Francesc ‘Cesc’ Guim, and GM/CFO Marc Fernández, accompanied headlines across Europe’s tech media.

At thumbnail size, it appears to show two sharply tailored men making a collaborative heart (🫶🏻) sign for the camera.

Enlarged, the object of their affections comes into view: a silicon chip, devoid of any flashy laser-etched heat spreader, all but camouflaged against the navy of Cesc’s jacket.

But its demure look belies its importance, both as a processor and as a symbol of European silicon sovereignty. The chip is Openchip’s BER10: a high-performance RISC-V application processor designed in Europe on open standards, and the beating heart of the Spanish startup’s ambitions.

The two hands holding the chip come from very different backgrounds. Cesc brings nearly two decades of CPU architecture experience from Intel; Marc the financial acumen required to turn engineering ambition into a sustainable business.

Openchip was founded in Barcelona as a joint venture between the Catalan engineering group GTD and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in response to the European Chips Act. The goal, in Cesc’s words, was to prove that Europe “can design and deliver world-class silicon on open standards, on its own terms.”

In early 2024, Openchip began building its team, tools, and IP from scratch, with work beginning on BER10 soon after. Less than two years later, Cesc and Marc had taken a team of 350-plus employees, across Spain, Italy, Poland, Belgium, France, Germany, and Ireland, to tapeout.

Delivering a basic microcontroller in that timeframe would be impressive. For a 64-bit, Linux-capable chip featuring a vector unit, a coherent fabric, a memory and interconnect subsystem, and its own management tile, it’s truly remarkable. And it worked first time — no respins required.

But as I found out over the next five questions, BER10’s journey has only just begun…

Cesc:Of course, overall everyone was very excited. But the joke I made when we took it out of the box was that now I have a saucer for my coffee. It’s one thing to get the first silicon back from the foundry, but then you have to do the bring-up, power-on, testing… I think it was about three weeks after the chip arrived that we actually booted the OS. Our first port of call was of course to run DOOM.

Marc:From my side of the company, which is less about engineering, just seeing the chip in real life was a big milestone. At the beginning there was no money, no product — nothing to say that we were capable of creating something like this. Then throughout so much development time, you’re working on something that is not tangible. So personally, when I held up that chip for the photo, it was to say, “look, it exists! We have been suffering and working for this.”

Cesc:It’s a combination of three things. The first is the strategy we followed and the toolchain we put in place. We built BER10 on IP that had already been proven globally; we can’t disclose all the details, but we developed our own ‘secret sauce’ on a foundation of production-ready IP in order to tape out a Technology Readiness Level 9 (TRL 9) chip that can be used in real production systems from day one. Advanced design, verification and emulation tools like ZeBu gave us a high degree of confidence that things would work at tapeout.

The second is the talent we have, because you can’t do these things without very experienced, very talented people. Fourteen years ago there was an Intel site here, on the same floor where we are now. And that happened because of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), which has a very strong community. Its architecture department has been noted for its technical papers for many, many years. Intel was here because of the pool of top talent coming out of the UPC, and later the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). I come from the UPC and the BSC myself, and we have been working with academia very closely through what we call the Openchip Academy. So for a number of students, graduating into Openchip was a logical next step.

And the third is the corporate and funding side, with Marc and the team ensuring that everything went smoothly. The number of complex deals and contracts we had to set up — IP, legal, finance, regulators — was crazy. We reached agreements where we can own all the foreground IP that we developed, so that any chip we make, and all the innovation we drive based on those chips, remains European. That was the most important part of the equation.

Marc:That and funding. The reality is that if we hadn’t had access to 111 million euros of NextGenerationEU funding through the IPCEI (Important Project of Common European Interest) on microelectronics, it would have been impossible to be here. The use of these funds, and how Spain has managed them, gave us a critical opportunity to mobilize capital and create Openchip.

Cesc:The greatest milestone for any new semiconductor company is to have first silicon in your hand. Once you have it and you show it, your credibility multiplies by 10. So our discussions now are very different from a year ago. Even a month on from launch, now we have booted an OS and have applications running, the conversations have evolved again. We’re selling a vision and a physical chip to run that vision on. And the fact that Openchip was capable of doing that in the timeframe we had. So now, all of a sudden, the promises on slides that we have been presenting for the past year and a half become a reality.

Marc:We have two tiers of knowledge. I’m mostly talking to people in procurement and legal who don’t know anything about semiconductors or RISC-V. So before I can get them excited, I have to explain why European sovereignty in silicon matters so much, and how BER10 will help the government, the sovereign entities and ultimately the citizens of Europe. Right now we have to establish the priority in which our customers get access to our chips, and what our go-to-market is.

Cesc:From a technical perspective, talking to end customers, it’s a little easier. We have a lot of excitement and support from many different verticals, such as private healthcare. These are the companies that were looking at us and thinking, “Oh, maybe these guys can do something.” But they could never define what “something” was — we felt that we had to lead by example. So now we have a piece of silicon, and a vision for what we do with it next. The chip is a foundational part of the story, but enterprises don’t deploy chips alone, they deploy systems. Systems that are integrated, certified, and supported, with production-grade software stacks that they can run mission-critical workloads on with confidence.

Cesc:An open standard ISA enables you to have different chipsets with different properties, different characteristics, and different price points, yet the language they speak is the same. And similarly, with the software stack, you need to bet on open software at the application level, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs for OpenAI and so on. They provide common software foundations to the companies here in Europe, from finance to healthcare, so those players are not stuck in one technology. Openness is what makes this industry work, and it’s very important to us. Which I guess is why you chose the name Openchip, right, Marc?

Marc:That’s exactly where the name came from. And that’s why we chose RISC-V. We wanted the possibility to widen connections with a lot of people, instead of taking a closed, proprietary development route. We’ve also been very active with the European Commission and the Chips Act, pushing hard for RISC-V, because when you look at European values, we want an open market, a competitive market with multiple players chiming in with different options, different value adds, and competition of the kind we see in the US or China. And one of the things we are discussing with other CSPs in Europe is the concept of seL4 systems, where you can have sovereign systems at every level of the stack. You can only do that if they are interoperable — there’s no other way to get there but through an open ISA. Europe needs to retain the ability to design its own architectures, control the key IP and technology roadmaps, understand and verify what is inside its systems, and develop the skills to keep innovating independently. These capabilities are not just about technological resilience and sovereignty; they are what build and retain the expertise and talent needed for Europe to be able to steer its own future, and to contribute to key strategic decisions.

Cesc:Of course, semiconductors are international by construction. True sovereignty comes from identifying what we cannot afford to lose control of, then being deliberate about what we deploy from trusted global partners. BER10 sits squarely on that line; it gives Europe tangible capability on the design and architecture side, built around RISC-V and open standards, while remaining part of a global semiconductor ecosystem.

Marc:Teamwork. It’s always teamwork.

Cesc:And money! But yes, a crazy amount of teamwork. I think we have a very solid foundation. Openchip is not only technology and engineering, it’s business, corporate, and technology engineering all mixed together. Because you need to make decisions on how you schedule your roadmap, connected to IP licensing, tape-out, and the corporate aspects. I think this co-engineering of finance and technology is something we need here in Europe to make sure we go as fast as we can.

Marc:We are ending the version of Openchip that began as a research program with the support of the Spanish government, the European Commission, BSC, and so on. Now it’s time to mature, establish our go-to-market strategy, and become a product-centric company that relies more on the market, and less on subsidies. It’ll be a gradual transition, but our partners will help us get there. The development of these chips is one of the reasons the BSC is a partner of Openchip, for example, and our work with RISC-V International will help us too.

Cesc:Yes, one thing I need to mention on behalf of all of Openchip is our gratitude toward RISC-V International. The board is now very diverse: European, US, and Chinese companies represented. So it’s really amazing that we get to share progress and confront challenges on a global level. I think we should be very proud of where RISC-V is today, both technologically and as a group of global members, because it’s not an easy task to get everyone working together.

Openchip’s journey continues at pace. Soon after the tapeout, SETT (the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation) agreed to invest 115.8 million euros in Openchip, and the Generalitat de Catalunya became a shareholder.

Openchip is now working on its first data-center product, built on BER10’s core blocks, with SUSE handling software, system integrators such as Bull poised to bring it all together, and the BSC already planning its use for long-term research.

The launch photo made for a good game of ‘spot the chip’. I’m looking forward to the next round, where I spot BER10 buried in a server rack at one of Europe’s critical infrastructure providers, public administrations, or sovereign cloud initiatives — processing data on local terms, insulating the region and securing its long-term digital autonomy.

Cesc and Marc would like to express their sincere thanks to colleagues Ariadna Puig, Violante Moschiano and Robin Giller, whose expertise and insight helped shape their answers.

Francesc ‘Cesc’ Guim is CEO at Openchip. Marc Fernández is Corporate General Manager and Chief Financial Officer. BER10 was announced on July 30, 2026.