Ainekko has acquired Esperanto Technologies’ AI chip IP and is open sourcing its production-grade RISC-V architecture.
Ainekko has acquired all intellectual property and select assets from Esperanto Technologies, including chip designs, development frameworks, and software tooling, to unlock one of the world’s most energy-efficient AI architectures as fully open source silicon.
With the release of RTL, reference designs, and development tools for Esperanto’s many-core RISC-V architecture, Ainekko aims to make advanced AI infrastructure open, accessible, and adaptable at the silicon level. The initiative focuses on empowering developers, researchers, and enterprises to create custom, efficient edge inference hardware.
“We’re building a new kind of AI infrastructure, one that is open, modular, and designed to evolve in the open. By open-sourcing these assets, we’re enabling developers, researchers, and enterprises to break free from closed ecosystems and innovate directly at the silicon level,” said Tanya Dadasheva, co-founder of Ainekko.
Esperanto’s ET-SoC-1 features more than 1,000 Minion™ cores capable of AI, HPC, and general-purpose workloads. Now, Ainekko is unlocking that value for robotics, industrial automation, embedded security, IoT devices, media processing, academic R&D, and custom SoC design.
“This is one of the most ambitious open-source silicon initiatives we’ve seen to date,” said Rich Wawrzyniak, Principal Analyst at The SHD Group. “By acquiring and open-sourcing this IP, Ainekko is enabling a wider range of companies to explore custom silicon for AI inference—especially in edge environments where power, cost, and flexibility are critical.”
Ainekko supports foundation-based governance to ensure transparency and community ownership.
“What Linux did for servers and what Kubernetes did for the cloud, we believe open hardware can now do for AI inference,” said Roman Shaposhnik, co-founder of Ainekko.
