By Toby Sterling

AMSTERDAM, March 6 (Reuters) - AxeleraAI, one of Europe's few companies making computer chips for artificial intelligence, has been awarded a grant of up to 61.6 million euros ($66 million) to develop a chip for use in data centres, as part of EU efforts to boost the sector.

Europe is trying to address an AI competitiveness gap with the United States and China, including by funding domestic chipmakers and building publicly funded data centres referred to as "AI factories" accessible to European scientists, companies and startups.

"It's a moment of pride," said Axelera CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo in a phone interview - and a chance for his company to expand its business.

The Eindhoven, Netherlands-based firm won funding from EuroHPC - the agency overseeing Europe Union's network of supercomputers and AI factories - to bring out a chip efficient at "inference" AI computing.

Inference can be compared to the usage or "thinking" step in AI that companies, such as Google GOOGL.O and France's Mistral, need when they build a large model, like a brain, that typically is trained on Nvidia NVDA.O chips.

"We are not here to challenge Nvidia in the data centre space, in the training," Del Maffeo said. "But when the network is ready and you want to run it, we are developing a solution that can deliver extremely high performance ... we can do that."

The emergence of Chinese large AI model DeepSeek, which claimed cutting edge performance at a lower cost, may increase demand for inference computing as AI models become more affordable.

Axelera's new Titania chip will be built on the open source RISC-V standard that is gaining traction in the auto industry and in China as an alternative to systems dominated by Intel INTC.O and Arm.

Axelera's current chip "Metis" is used in "edge AI" applications outside data centres, such as inside factories analysing CCTV footage to identify safety lapses.

Axelera has previously raised $200 million from investors including Samsung since it was founded in 2021.

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; editing by Barbara Lewis)

((amsterdam.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com))