Sept 29 (Reuters) – Belgian chip research hub imec will appoint Patrick Vandenameele as its new chief executive with current CEO Luc Van den hove becoming chairman, the company told Reuters on Monday.
Belgium’s imec, one of the world’s top semiconductor R&D firms, has made the change to help it adapt to the changing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaking, Vandenameele said in an interview.
Sign up here.
The rising influence of AI is reshaping the company’s priorities as it seeks to deepen its ties with cloud computing providers.
Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Meta (META.O), and Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), known as hyperscalers, control about half of the world’s data‑center capacity and are rapidly expanding their market share as AI build‑outs surges.
This AI boom has created demand for new, more efficient chips to fill their multibillion-dollar data centres.
“They are screaming for solutions to scale up, scale out, and to do this at a sustainable power balance. Power is the key problem in this case,” Vandenameele said.
VENTURE & CHIPS ACT
Under his leadership, the company plans to launch more spin-offs based on its technology. It will give start-ups earlier access to its chipmaking lines and help European deep tech firms overcome its funding and manufacturing hurdles, he said.
“The barrier for these small companies to get access to leading-edge technology is usually very high because they need to compete with huge companies to get access to these fabs”, Vandenameele said.
The Belgium-based lab is building a sub-2 nanometer chip pilot line, using funding of 2.5 billion euros ($2.9 billion) from the European Union’s act, to give European tech firms access to manufacturing technology that would otherwise be economically unattainable.
($1 = 0.8563 euros)
Reporting by Nathan Vifflin; Editing by Matt Scuffham