Dutch startup Euclyd has raised more than €200 million in Series A funding, led by Samsung and the EU, to develop a high-efficiency inference chip aimed at disrupting the AI hardware landscape dominated by Nvidia.
Euclyd, a Dutch AI chip startup based in Eindhoven, has raised more than €200 million in Series A funding in a deal co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the European Union’s Scaleup Europe Fund, which is managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries. The company says the money will accelerate work on CRAFTWERK, its custom inference chip platform designed to lower the power cost of running large language models, a problem that has become one of the main constraints on data-centre AI expansion. According to the company and the reporting around the deal, the round ranks among the largest semiconductor financings in Europe.
At the centre of Euclyd’s pitch is a claim that its system can deliver about 100 times better power efficiency per generated token than Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips on comparable model workloads. That figure comes from the company’s own modelling rather than independent commercial testing. TechRadar Pro noted when the system was unveiled that validation at scale had not yet taken place, and the startup remains at an early stage of development despite the size of the financing.
The architectural argument is straightforward: inference systems waste a large share of their energy moving data back and forth between compute and memory. Euclyd says CRAFTWERK reduces that overhead by combining 16,384 custom SIMD processors with its own Ultra Bandwidth Memory in a single System-in-Package. The company’s planned CWS 32 rack, which would house 32 of these chips, is described as capable of more than an exaflop of compute, 32 terabytes of on-system memory and roughly 125 kilowatts of power draw. Euclyd says it expects to use the system for large-scale deployment of models such as Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick.
Samsung’s role is notable because it is not only a lead investor but also the manufacturer of Euclyd’s first silicon in South Korea. That dual position is unusual in semiconductors, where suppliers and financiers are typically separate. TechRadar Pro said the arrangement gives Samsung both a strategic foothold in an alternative AI infrastructure stack and practical insight into whether non-HBM inference designs can become a viable market. The company’s founder and chief executive, Bernardo Kastrup, told CNBC in earlier remarks that Samsung’s memory expertise, systems knowledge and supply-chain reach made it an especially valuable partner.
The European Commission’s Scaleup Europe Fund is also an important signal. According to the fund’s public mandate, it was created to back late-stage European deep-tech companies in areas including AI, quantum computing, clean energy, space and biotech, with cheque sizes typically ranging from €100 million to €500 million. Euclyd is the fund’s second major investment and its first in AI silicon. Ted Persson of EQT said in the announcement that the startup combines semiconductor expertise with a plan to address some of the hardest constraints in AI infrastructure.
The board appointment of Peter Wennink, the former chief executive of ASML, adds further weight to the company’s ambitions. Having overseen the rollout of extreme ultraviolet lithography, he is one of the most influential figures in modern chip manufacturing. In the announcement, Wennink said Europe has strong capabilities in semiconductors, advanced manufacturing and systems engineering, and that Euclyd can turn those strengths into a globally competitive AI infrastructure platform. Even so, the commercial challenge remains considerable. The startup has no deployed customers, first deliveries to two prospective enterprise clients are expected in 2027, and the full rack system is targeted for 2028. TechRadar Pro reported that Euclyd is also pursuing an intellectual-property licensing model, which could help it avoid some of the adoption friction that has long protected Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem.
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