Samsung invests in European Nvidia competitor in the AI chip market

Samsung Electronics has become one of the key investors in the Dutch startup Euclyd, which develops its own processors and data center systems for artificial intelligence. The company has raised over €200 million and is trying to offer a cheaper and more energy-efficient alternative to the infrastructure market currently dominated by Nvidia.

Euclyd has closed a Series A funding round, which was co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries. Other investors include the Danish EIFO, imec.xpand, and the Brabant Development Agency.

At the same time, Peter Wennink has become the chairman of the board of directors of Euclyd. He led ASML, the world's largest manufacturer of lithography equipment for advanced chip production, for more than ten years.

The Eindhoven-based startup has focused on one of the most expensive stages of modern AI work—inference, the direct execution of an already trained model when processing user requests. It is with the growth in the number of such requests that data center needs for electricity, memory, and computing power sharply increase.

Euclyd wants to lower the cost of AI operation

The company's main development is called Craftwerk. Instead of the traditional approach to AI accelerators, Euclyd creates a comprehensive system that combines specialized processors, proprietary memory architecture, and server equipment.

According to the company's own data, one Craftwerk chip has 16,384 specialized SIMD processors, up to 1 TB of high-speed memory, and performance of up to 32 petaflops in FP4 calculations.

Euclyd is also developing a CWS 32 server system with 32 such processors. The company claims that its architecture can potentially provide about 100 times better energy efficiency and lower cost per token processed compared to leading solutions. At the same time, these figures are still based on Euclyd's internal benchmarks, not on independent comparisons of finished mass-produced systems.

The company plans to use the over €200 million raised to expand its engineering team, bring chips and server systems to production, and prepare for commercial launch.

Samsung simultaneously cooperates with Nvidia and its potential competitors

For Samsung, the investment is interesting not only as a financial bet. Euclyd is already collaborating with the South Korean company ADTechnology on implementing Craftwerk in silicon, and the production process involves the use of Samsung Foundry technologies.

At the same time, Samsung itself remains an important part of Nvidia's ecosystem and one of the world's largest manufacturers of memory and semiconductors.

The investment in Euclyd comes amid a broader struggle to reduce the AI industry's dependence on Nvidia. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are developing their own specialized accelerators, and several startups are trying to compete with Nvidia specifically in the inference segment, where the costs of deploying large models are rapidly growing.

For now, Euclyd remains a startup that still has to prove its claimed performance in mass commercial use. However, the round of over €200 million, Samsung's participation, and the arrival of the former ASML CEO make the company one of the notable European contenders in the AI infrastructure market.

Based on materials from: Euclyd, DigiTimes, TechCrunch