Intel Veteran Sandra Rivera Takes Helm at VSORA to Challenge AI Giants

PARIS, France – January 15, 2026 – In a strategic move signaling a new phase of intense competition in the global AI hardware market, French deep-tech company VSORA has appointed Sandra Rivera, a celebrated semiconductor industry leader and former CEO of Altera, as the new Chair of its Board of Directors. The appointment, effective today, brings a titan of Silicon Valley with over 30 years of experience at the heart of Intel to a European challenger poised to take on established giants like NVIDIA and AMD.

Rivera’s arrival comes at a pivotal moment for VSORA. The company is on the cusp of launching its flagship AI inference chip, Jotunn8, in early 2026, a product it claims will redefine performance and energy efficiency standards in data centers. For a relatively young firm founded in 2015, securing a leader of Rivera’s caliber is a significant coup, lending immense credibility to its technology and global ambitions.

A Titan of Tech Bets on a European Challenger

Sandra Rivera's career is a testament to her deep expertise in scaling complex, multi-billion-dollar technology businesses. Her more than two-decade tenure at Intel saw her rise through a series of increasingly critical leadership roles. Most recently, as the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Data Center and AI Group, she was responsible for the company's entire portfolio of enterprise products, including Xeon CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and the Gaudi AI accelerators that compete directly in the market VSORA is targeting. Her leadership extended to shaping Intel's enterprise-wide AI strategy, placing her at the epicenter of the industry's most significant technological shift.

Her experience is not limited to product development. As CEO of Altera, an Intel company, she led the programmable chip division, earning the title "FPGA Person of the Year" for her turnaround efforts. Her resume also includes a tenure as Intel's Chief People Officer, where she managed a global workforce, and as GM of the Network Platforms Group, which she grew into a market leader. This diverse background in corporate transformation, spinouts, and strategic realignment is precisely what a growing company like VSORA needs to navigate its next phase.

Khaled Maalej, VSORA’s founder and CEO, highlighted the significance of this appointment. “Sandra’s background in semiconductors, data center, AI, networking and cloud infrastructure well aligns with ours,” he noted. “Her abilities to drive technical advancements in a competitive landscape and commitment to fostering innovation and building high-performance global organizations is welcome as we ramp production of our ultra-high-performance AI chip Jotunn8.”

For her part, Rivera expressed confidence in the French firm's potential. “I am excited about VSORA’s unique capabilities and its track record of success and accomplishments,” she stated, adding that the “speed and agility” of a smaller company are “superpowers” in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

The Jotunn8 Gambit: A New Contender in the AI Arms Race

The centerpiece of VSORA's strategy is Jotunn8, an AI chip designed specifically for inference—the process of running trained AI models to make predictions and generate content. While the market is currently dominated by NVIDIA's H100 and H200 GPUs and challenged by AMD's MI300 series, VSORA is making bold claims about its new silicon.

Jotunn8 is engineered to deliver a staggering 3,200 TFLOPS of compute power. More critically, VSORA asserts it achieves over three times the real-world performance of existing solutions while consuming less than half the power. This remarkable efficiency is attributed to a purpose-built, near-memory architecture designed to overcome the “memory wall”—a common bottleneck where powerful processing cores sit idle while waiting for data. The chip features a massive 288 GB of HBM3e memory with 8 TB/s of bandwidth, aiming to keep its compute units constantly fed.

To bring this ambitious design to life, the company has partnered with industry leaders. Jotunn8 is being manufactured using TSMC’s advanced 5nm process and CoWoS multi-chip packaging technology, with silicon implementation partner GUC overseeing the complex integration. This chiplet-based design links powerful compute chiplets with high-capacity memory, a sophisticated approach typically reserved for the industry's largest players.

Production of the chip officially began in late 2025, with full-volume availability slated for the first quarter of 2026. This timeline positions Jotunn8 to enter a market hungry for alternatives and desperate for more efficient solutions.

Navigating a Market Hungry for Power and Efficiency

VSORA’s focus on energy efficiency is not just a technical selling point; it addresses a looming crisis in the tech industry. As AI models become larger and more ubiquitous, their energy consumption is skyrocketing. Projections indicate that AI workloads could account for as much as 50% of total data center energy use by 2030 if current hardware trends continue. The power draw of a single high-end AI accelerator is already approaching 1,000 watts, pushing data center operators toward costly and complex liquid cooling solutions.

In this environment, a chip that delivers a threefold performance gain at less than half the power could be a game-changer. It promises not only a lower total cost of ownership through reduced electricity bills but also a path toward more sustainable AI infrastructure. This value proposition is compelling for hyperscale cloud providers, enterprises building private AI clouds, and nations focused on building sovereign compute infrastructure, a key goal of initiatives like the European Chips Act.

Rivera’s role will be to translate this technological promise into market execution. Her first priority, she stated, is to work with Maalej and the board on “the foundational infrastructure, product roadmap and evolution of the product strategy to differentiate, scale and execute with innovation, rigor, discipline and excellence.” This focus on disciplined execution is critical for any hardware startup aiming to compete on a global stage.

Fortifying for Global Scale

VSORA is not just armed with promising technology and new leadership; it is also well-capitalized. The company has raised a total of $65.7 million, anchored by a recent $46 million Series C funding round in April 2025. The round was led by Otium Capital and included participation from Omnes Capital, Adélie Capital, and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, signaling strong institutional and governmental backing for its mission to establish a European AI hardware champion.

This financial runway provides the stability needed to support the costly process of ramping up chip production, developing software ecosystems, and building a global sales and support organization. With offices already established in key Asian markets like Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, VSORA has laid the groundwork for an international push.

With Sandra Rivera providing board-level oversight, VSORA combines the agility of a startup with the strategic wisdom of a seasoned industry veteran. Her appointment is a clear declaration that the French company is no longer just a promising deep-tech innovator; it is a serious contender preparing to fight for a significant share of the multi-billion-dollar AI inference market.