The collaboration will combine Axelera AI’s Metis AI Platform with SOMs from the Arduino Pro range to provide customers with easy-to-use hardware and software to innovate around AI.
According to the companies, “users will be able to enjoy the freedom to dictate their own AI journey, thanks to tools that provide unique digital in-memory computing and RISC-V controlled dataflow technology, delivering high performance and usability at a fraction of the cost and power of the many other solutions that are currently available.”
The first announcement as part of this partnership is an integrated AI technology. The Portenta X8, running an offline pre-trained LLM (Phi-3) to power an AI-driven industrial monitoring system capable of processing and analysing sensor data from different locations and manufacturing machines, can identify trends and potential issues in real time. A demo will be available at CES in January.
This partnership will allow the 33-million-strong community of creative thinkers already working with Arduino to have access to Axelera AI’s AI acceleration platform.
“Axelera AI was founded with a vision to democratise AI by offering fast, easy-to-access AI technology that minimises power consumption and cost,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and Co-Founder at Axelera AI. “This is critical for companies to realise true AI innovation. Another important step to democratising AI is building an ecosystem of collaborators all striving to achieve that same goal.”
This partnership is also an important step toward developing that AI ecosystem of partners looking to reduce barriers around the most advanced and powerful technologies as well as bringing together skillsets from a wide range of disciplines, including builders, enablers, co-creators, and developers.
“This partnership exemplifies Arduino's mission to enable innovators with powerful, accessible tools that bridge creativity and real-world problem-solving,” said Fabio Violante, CEO at Arduino. “By working with Axelera AI, we’re providing developers and businesses the means to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their projects, opening the door to groundbreaking innovations across industries. It’s exciting to see how this collaboration will empower our community and beyond to turn bold ideas into impactful solutions.”
Investments in AI are only expected to increase and IDC recently forecast that worldwide spending on technology to support AI strategies will reach $337 billion in the upcoming year.
The estimate is likely to more than double to $749 billion by 2028 as organisations explore new use cases such as generative AI and agentic AI – an emerging trend, expected to pick up steam in 2025, that employs autonomous machine “agents” that move beyond query-and-response generative chatbots to accomplish enterprise-level tasks without human guidance.
