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French Tech: Vsora Designs AI Chips – May 12

Khaled Maalej, co-founder and CEO of Vsora, was the guest of Laure Closier on French Tech this Monday, May 12. He spoke about the company’s goals, which include producing artificial intelligence chips that deliver unprecedented performance while being more energy-efficient and more affordable than those of the global market leaders. The interview aired on Good Morning Business. Catch the show Monday through Friday and listen again via podcast.

Laure: It is now 8:23 on BFM Business and BFM Discovery during the Morning Economy program. Today’s topic: AI chips with unprecedented performance—more energy-efficient, more affordable than those from global leaders. That’s quite a project. Good morning, Khaled Maalej, co-founder and CEO of VSORA. Your challenge is to compete with NVIDIA, which is already tough, especially when you look at the struggles of microelectronics companies in France and Europe to develop such chips. What market segment are you targeting, and what are you doing differently?

Khaled: Yes, VSORA actually makes electronic chips for artificial intelligence—circuits that provide computing capabilities equivalent to those of NVIDIA or AMD today. What sets us apart is that we focus solely on inference. AI has two main components: training, where algorithms are created—that’s not our focus—and inference, where those trained algorithms are used. That’s where GPUs are typically used. We’re focused on that second part. The big market challenge in inference is reducing the cost of computation, of processing queries. VSORA’s positioning is precisely in this area. What distinguishes us from other chips today is our computing efficiency. We offer chips with very high computing capacity, and we also allow for highly efficient arithmetic utilization embedded in the circuits. That’s what significantly lowers the cost of inference.

Speaker 3: But is this still just a project, a deep-tech concept, or is it already a working product? I ask because it seems a bit naïve, but we sincerely wish you success. How can a company of your size achieve what NVIDIA—with tens of billions of dollars—has not?

Laure: You just raised €40 million from Otium, which helps. But still…

Khaled: Right, we’re not talking billions, as you said. What’s changed today is chip architecture. Companies like NVIDIA have architectures that offer a certain performance, which works well today—the tech is solid. But there’s still a performance gap. We’ve developed an architecture that bridges that gap. That’s our core differentiator.

Speaker 3: So you’re saying that for them to achieve the same performance, they’d need to completely overhaul their architecture, which would be very costly?

Khaled: Exactly. That’s not easy for large companies. It’s always possible, but it’s not simple for them. That’s where we come in—with a solution to that problem.

Laure: Who are your direct clients?

Khaled: The end customers are data center operators. But we don’t sell directly to them. We sell to the companies that build the servers, who then sell to the data centers.

Laure: So you’re going up against NVIDIA in those tenders, I imagine?
Khaled: We don’t have a chip ready yet. That’s what the funding is for—to go into production. But yes, we will face them. Just to give an idea: ChatGPT currently handles about 5,000 requests per second, which is a lot. But compared to Google, which handles 100,000 requests per second, it’s very little. The market needs to scale from 5,000 to 100,000 requests per second. There’s a real need for technical solutions to lower the cost of that jump. And that’s where we come in.

Laure: So you’re the answer?

Khaled: Yes, we provide that answer.

Speaker 3: So maybe in a year or so, when I submit a request to ChatGPT, it will go through your chip?
Khaled: That’s the goal.
Speaker 3: That would be amazing.

Laure: You’re saying a year? Toni Morel?

Khaled: Even less than that.

Laure: Less than a year?

Khaled: Yes, our chip will be ready before the end of the year. It should be available in Q1 or Q2 of next year.

Speaker 3: You’re not manufacturing the chip yourself—you’re what’s called a fabless company, right? So a foundry will produce it?

Khaled: Exactly. Like everyone else, we use TSMC, the Taiwanese company. There are two key technologies involved: the silicon node, which must be very small—hence TSMC—and the packaging. High-performance chips with a lot of embedded memory require advanced packaging technologies.

Speaker 3: Is there also a sovereignty angle to this? I imagine that’s part of your pitch.

Laure: Probably your top marketing argument.

Khaled: Yes, sovereignty is very important. Hardware and AI chips are becoming strategic economic weapons. Today, we’re the only European company able to offer a chip with this level of performance and to demonstrate it against the major players.

Laure: Does that argument work? Or in the end, is cost still the deciding factor?

Khaled: Cost always wins over sovereignty. But the sovereignty argument is gaining traction at the European Commission. When Europe invests €20–40 billion in data centers, 80% of that money currently flows to the U.S. Having a European solution helps retain value within the European economy.

Laure: Still, you can’t be too far off in pricing, otherwise it won’t work. Sovereignty only becomes a serious argument when the price is right. Thank you very much, Khaled Maalej, for joining us this morning on Morning Economy.