This Monday, June 29, the Council of Ministers authorized an investment of 115.77 million euros in Openchip & Software Technologiesa microelectronics company based in Barcelona and five years old. The operation is channeled by the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETTthe digital SEPI, dependent on the Ministry for Digital Transformation) through the Next Tech facility of the Recovery Plan. It is the largest one-time injection of public capital received by a Spanish technology company in the sector to date.
It comes just a week after another move. On June 23, The Generalitat converted part of a 35 million bridge loan into sharesan operation that gave him 5% of the capital and set a implicit valuation for Openchip in around 700 million. With that reference, the 115.77 million from the SETT would be equivalent to a participation of up to 16.54%, which would place direct public control (State and Generalitat) above 20%. Both administrations will have a seat on the council. The Government also included a veto right over any transfer of the headquarters outside of Catalonia.
Added to the 111 million already received via PERTE Chip, public support accumulated is close to 262 million. The public supports a good part of the structure.
A company that designs, not manufactures
Openchip was born in 2021 as a joint initiative of the Catalan engineering group GTDaround 54% of the capital, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), the center that operates the MareNostrumaround 46%. Today it employs about 300 people, almost all of them engineers, and operates under a fabless– Designs intellectual property and outsources manufacturing to external foundries.
The CEO himself has admitted that this production will leave Europe, which in practice points to where these types of projects usually aim: TSMC. The industrial plan estimates investments close to 500 million to deploy the entire infrastructure.
What it designs are processors and accelerators based on RISC-V, the open source architecture that has become the European bet (and, ahem, China) to avoid the dependency on x86 (Intel, AMD) and ARM. Its specific product is a vector accelerator for AI and high-performance computing, integrated into DARE SGA1a 240 million European initiative led by BSC itself that distributes the design between Openchip (vector accelerator), the Dutch Axelera (AI processing unit) and the Czech Codasip (general processor). The goal: a European hardware and software proposal operational by 2028.
The schedule, the equipment and the exam
This is where it is good for everyone to temper expectations. In November 2025, Cesc Guim (pictured above), CEO and former Intel, said that the company had just sent its first prototype to the factory and that commercial production was planned for 2028. The commercial argument is energy efficiency: its designs promise to reduce electricity consumption by 20% to 30% compared to current alternatives. The real comparison can only be made when there is working silicon, not plans.
A few weeks ago, in May, Openchip signed Tobías Martínez as presidentformer CEO of Cellnex for almost a decade. Replaced Carlos Kinder in a change that the company did not officially confirm. His profile provides what a startup of 300 engineers with a round of hundreds of millions was missing: plenty of experience in the capital markets.
The operation is sold under the convenient modern mantra of ‘European technological sovereignty’, and the truth is that the framework is real: Europe today designs a minuscule part of the world’s chips, and certainly none of the leading ones. But There remain questions that public investment does not solve on its own:
- Whether Openchip will achieve a competitive product against rivals with a twenty-year advantage (Guim himself has admitted it).
- Yes, manufacturing will continue to depend on TSMC, which keeps Europe away from the critical link in a long-term dependence.
- And whether the intensive financing model, with two administrations on the board and a regional veto over the headquarters, will allow the flexibility and agility that a semiconductor business requires to compete.
The State has bought shares, a seat on the council and qualified employment in Catalonia. What remains to be seen is whether the chips arrive. And they work as promised.
Featured image | Openchip, Xataka
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