Samsung has joined the funding round of Dutch startup Euclyd, which raised $230 million as investment surges into alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs. Euclyd CEO Bernardo Kastrup told CNBC that the company’s 200 million euro Series A was co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries.
Founded in 2024, Euclyd is developing an AI chip system for inference. The company says its design differs from GPU architecture and includes both processor and memory architecture.
Investor interest in such projects is rising as Nvidia maintains an almost dominant position in the market for top-end AI chips. Its graphics processors, originally built for gaming, were later widely adopted for training AI models and for inference. Against that backdrop, both hyperscalers and startups are seeking to build their own processors for AI workloads.
In August, OpenAI said its first AI chip, Jalapeño, delivered “industry-leading speed and efficiency.” Google, AWS and Meta are also developing their own AI chips.
Kastrup said artificial intelligence is becoming a foundation for economic growth, scientific discovery and national competitiveness, but its potential will remain constrained unless the infrastructure beneath it changes fundamentally.
Euclyd’s systems have not yet been proven in large-scale commercial deployments. Even so, the company argues that its silicon systems for foundational models can reduce the energy needs and costs of AI data center infrastructure, an area currently attracting strong funding interest.
The startup is targeting two revenue streams: selling hardware and physical rack systems to enterprise customers seeking secure self-hosted AI inference, and licensing its intellectual property to companies that want to develop their own chips based on existing technology.
Kastrup said Samsung can help in ways that go beyond capital. He noted that the company is one of the world’s biggest memory manufacturers, has deep engineering expertise, understands systems and supply chains, and brings a broad network.
Euclyd aims to start rolling out its physical chip systems in 2028 and to serve thousands of enterprise customers by 2030.
