Amid a boom in investment in alternative products, Samsung has backed a Dutch AI chip maker with a $231 million funding round. Nvidia’s Graphics processing unit.
Euclyd CEO Bernardo Kastrup exclusively told CNBC that the company’s €200 million Series A was backed by Somerset Capital Partners, a scale-up European fund managed by EQT and Innovation Industries, which co-led the round with Samsung.
Founded in 2024, the startup designs AI chip systems with different architectures than GPUs for inference, including processor and memory architectures.
Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company after its GPUs, originally designed for gaming, were repurposed to train and use AI models, known as inference.
The company has a near monopoly on the market for top-of-the-line chips, but some hyperscalers, along with startups, are looking to develop their own processors for AI workloads.
OpenAI announced in August that its first AI chip, Jalapeño, has “industry-leading speed and efficiency.” Google, AWS, and Meta are also developing their own AI chips.
“AI is becoming the foundation of economic growth, scientific discovery, and national competitiveness, but its potential will remain constrained unless we fundamentally change the underlying infrastructure,” Kastrup said.
Euclyd’s system has not been proven at scale in commercial deployments.
However, the company said its underlying model silicon system will reduce energy demands and costs for AI data center infrastructure, which is in rapidly growing demand for funding.
The company is targeting two revenue streams. One is the sale of hardware and physical rack systems to enterprise customers seeking secure self-hosted AI inference, and the other is the sale of intellectual property to companies that want to develop their own chips based on existing technology.
“Samsung will help us in more ways than just money,” Kastrup said. “They’re one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world. They’ve done a lot of engineering, they know a lot about systems, they know their supply chain, they have a huge network.”
Euclyd aims to begin rolling out its physical chip system in 2028 and serve thousands of enterprise customers by 2030, Kastrup told CNBC.
