By Nathan Vifflin
(Reuters) -Belgian chip research hub imec will appoint Patrick Vandenameele as its new chief executive with current CEO Luc Van den hove becoming chairman, the company told Reuters on Monday.
Belgium’s imec, one of the world’s top semiconductor R&D firms, has made the change to help it adapt to the changing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaking, Vandenameele said in an interview.
The rising influence of AI is reshaping the company’s priorities as it seeks to deepen its ties with cloud computing providers.
Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Meta (META.O), and Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), known as hyperscalers, control about half of the world’s data‑center capacity and are rapidly expanding their market share as AI build‑outs surges.
This AI boom has created demand for new, more efficient chips to fill their multibillion-dollar data centres.
“They are screaming for solutions to scale up, scale out, and to do this at a sustainable power balance. Power is the key problem in this case,” Vandenameele said.
Belgium’s imec matches the most advanced and expensive tools of makers like ASML and Applied Materials, with chipmakers and designers like TSMC, Nvidia, Apple and Google.
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Vandenameele, 52, began his career at imec in the 1990s, co‑founding four startups—three based on imec technology before taking on senior leadership roles at firms like Qorvo, and Huawei.
Under his leadership, the company plans to launch more spin-offs based on its technology. It will give start-ups earlier access to its chipmaking lines and help European deep tech firms overcome its funding and manufacturing hurdles, he said.
“The barrier for these small companies to get access to leading-edge technology is usually very high because they need to compete with huge companies to get access to these fabs”, Vandenameele said.
The Belgium-based lab is building a sub-2 nanometer chip pilot line, using funding of 2.5 billion euros ($2.9 billion) from the European Union’s act, to give European tech firms access to manufacturing technology that would otherwise be economically unattainable.
The research organisation is closely associated with top lithography equipment maker ASML, which was founded the same year across the nearby Dutch border, in Veldhoven.
($1 = 0.8563 euros)
(Reporting by Nathan Vifflin; Editing by Matt Scuffham)
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