Axelera AI Partners with Arduino to Deliver On-Device Local LLMs Running at the Edge

Metis acceleration platform will be paired with the Arduino Pro family of systems-on-modules to offer fully-local machine learning.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) specialist Axelera AI has announced a partnership with Arduino to bring its in-house Metis acceleration platform to the Arduino Pro range — and plans to showcase the pairing for edge AI as a live demo during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this coming January.

"Axelera AI was founded with a vision to democratize AI by offering fast, easy-to-access AI technology that minimizes power consumption and cost," says Axelera AI co-founder and chief executive officer Fabrizio Del Maffeo. "This is critical for companies to realize true AI innovation. Another important step to democratizing AI is building an ecosystem of collaborators all striving to achieve that same goal. We cannot wait to see what the Arduino community will create through this partnership."

"This partnership exemplifies Arduino's mission to enable innovators with powerful, accessible tools that bridge creativity and real-world problem-solving," adds Arduino chief executive officer Fabio Violante of the team-up. "By working with Axelera AI, we're providing developers and businesses the means to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their projects, opening the door to groundbreaking innovations across industries. It's exciting to see how this collaboration will empower our community and beyond to turn bold ideas into impactful solutions."

Axelera's Metis platform delivers power-efficient acceleration for machine learning and artificial intelligence at the edge, typically delivered as an M.2 module or full-size PCI Express add-in board for installation into existing hosts — as with the M.2 module the company unveiled back in January last year, which delivered up to 214 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute at a power efficiency of 15 TOPS per watt.

The partnership will see the Metis accelerators added to Arduino's Pro family of systems-on-modules (SOMs), delivering enough compute performance to run an industrial monitoring system pulling in multiple temperature, humidity, air quality, carbon dioxide, and other sensor readings and feeding them to a pre-trained large language model, Microsoft's Phi-3, running entirely on-device.

More information on the Metis platform is available on the Axelera website; appointments to meet with the company at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 7th to 10th, 2025 can be booked on a dedicated page.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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