Grenoble's AlpSemi raises €17M to build power chips for solid-state breakers and AI data centres

Grenoble-based AlpSemi has raised a €17 million (around $19.5 million) round to industrialise its power-semiconductor platform. The financing was led by France's Yotta Capital, with SE Ventures — the venture arm of Schneider Electric — Navitas Semiconductor of the United States, and Luxembourg's Cycle Group joining.

Switching power, faster and with less loss

AlpSemi designs wide- and ultra-wide-bandgap power switches. Bandgap is a property of the semiconductor material: silicon carbide and gallium nitride switch electrical power far more efficiently and at higher voltages than the silicon that still dominates most equipment, wasting less energy as heat. That efficiency is what makes them attractive for the two markets AlpSemi is targeting.

The first is the solid-state circuit breaker. Conventional breakers are electromechanical — they physically open a contact to cut current, which is slow in semiconductor terms. Replacing that mechanism with power semiconductors lets a breaker trip in microseconds and be controlled in software, a meaningful shift for the electrical systems inside modern buildings. AlpSemi's first product, the AS800, is aimed squarely at this.

The AI data-centre angle

The second market is the one drawing the most capital across the industry: AI data centres. As compute density climbs, operators are moving to 800V DC power architectures to deliver more power with less loss and copper — and that transition runs directly through the kind of high-voltage power switches AlpSemi makes. The component sits well below the GPUs in the public conversation, but every watt that reaches a chip passes through this layer first.

A European sovereignty play

The investor syndicate is the clearest signal here. SE Ventures ties AlpSemi to Schneider Electric, a global force in electrical distribution and a natural channel for solid-state breakers. Navitas Semiconductor, a listed US specialist in gallium-nitride and silicon-carbide power chips, brings deep domain weight. Together they read less like a financial round and more like an industrial alignment around a European-built supplier — at a moment when the continent is openly trying to reduce its dependence on imported chips.

CEO Frédéric Dupont, who runs the company alongside CTO Fabrice Letertre, frames the ambition plainly: the financing should let AlpSemi "emerge as a leading global industrial player in power electronics." The money is earmarked for exactly that — industrialisation and commercial scale-up — the hard, capital-heavy step of turning a validated design into volume production. The question now is execution: power semiconductors reward those who can manufacture reliably at scale, and that is where €17 million has to go furthest.