In the latest wave of investment fever targeting alternatives to NVIDIA's GPUs, a Dutch AI chip startup has secured major backing from Samsung and multiple European investors.
Euclyd CEO Bernardo Kastrup confirmed that the company's €200 million Series A round was co-led by Samsung alongside Somerset Capital Partners, Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT), and Innovation Industries. Founded in 2024, the startup is developing an AI chip system that diverges from conventional GPU architecture, with a dedicated focus on inference tasks across both processor and memory design. While NVIDIA continues to dominate the high-end AI chip segment, hyperscalers and startups alike are actively pursuing alternatives—including OpenAI's newly unveiled "Jalapeño" chip, as well as in-house efforts from Google, Amazon AWS, and Meta.
Why Euclyd Deserves a Closer Look
On the surface, this looks like just another funding round in the NVIDIA alternative race. But there's far more beneath the surface. First, consider the people involved. Former ASML President and CEO Peter Wennink has taken the helm as chairman of the board. A leader who once ran the world's most dominant lithography company betting on a startup founded in 2024 is arguably the strongest signal in this entire deal. Second, look at the nature of the capital. Beyond the co-lead investors, the roster includes Denmark's Export and Investment Fund (EIFO), Belgium's imec.xpand, the Netherlands' Brabant Development Agency (BOM), and Quadri—this is not ordinary financial investment but a coordinated bet from multiple European national capitals. Third, examine the timeline and business model. Euclyd plans to begin shipping physical chip systems by 2028, targeting thousands of enterprise clients by 2030. Revenue will follow a dual-track approach—selling on-premise inference racks to enterprises while also licensing chip IP to external partners. Founded by Bernardo Kastrup and Atul Sinha at Eindhoven's High Tech Campus, the company's roadmap centers on two flagship products: craftwerk, which it bills as the world's first agentic AI chip, and craftwerk station CWS 32, touted as the lowest-power exascale AI factory.
Mutual Benefits for Samsung and Europe
Samsung stands as the only manufacturer globally that combines memory, logic foundry, and advanced packaging capabilities under one roof. Its HBM market share has climbed from 15% in Q2 2025 to 33% in Q2 2026, and Samsung is the exclusive HBM4 supplier for OpenAI's Jalapeño chip. Investing in an inference-focused chip company built around "processor-memory co-design" effectively creates a technology buyer and ecosystem entry point for Samsung's HBM4 capacity and 4nm logic lines—Kastrup himself acknowledges that Samsung brings far more than capital, including memory capacity, engineering expertise, and supply chain access. Meanwhile, Europe's Chips Act targets for 2030 production capacity are lagging across the board. What Europe lacks is not lithography equipment, but rather chip product companies capable of tying together the ASML, NXP, and imec ecosystem. Wennink's chairmanship, combined with Danish and Belgian state-backed capital, represents Europe's effort to close the gap in design-scale commercialization.
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