There is another potential star on the mystery chip circuit! Samsung and European multinational capital spurred 200 million euros to bolster Euclyd
The Zhitong Finance App learned that in a boom in investment in Nvidia GPU alternatives, Samsung supported a Dutch artificial intelligence chip maker in a $231 million round of financing.
Euclyd CEO Bernardo Kastrup said in an interview with the media that the company's 200 million euro A round was supported by Somerset Capital Partners, Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries, all of which co-led this round of financing with Samsung.
The startup, founded in 2024, is designing an AI chip system that is different from GPU architecture, dedicated to inference tasks, and covers processor and memory architectures.
Nvidia dominates the high-end AI chip sector, but hyperscale cloud vendors and startups are looking for alternatives — including OpenAI's new “Jalapeño” chip, as well as in-house R&D from Google, Amazon AWS, and Meta.
The underrated Euclyd
Looking at the numbers alone, this is just another round of financing to replace Nvidia, but the reason behind this financing is not simple.
First, it's people. Peter Wennink, the former president and CEO of Asmack, became the company's chairman. A person who once held the helm of the world's lithographers is betting on a startup that will only be founded in 2024, which is the most valuable sign of the whole thing.
The second is the nature of money. In addition to the co-lead investors, the list of participants also includes the Danish Export and Investment Fund (EIFO), Belgium's imec.xpand, the Dutch Brabant Development Agency (BOM), and Quadri — this is not an ordinary financial investment, but a joint bet by European multinational capital.
The third is the timeline and business model. Euclyd plans to ship physical chip systems starting in 2028 and serving thousands of enterprise customers in 2030; revenue is on a dual track — selling locally built inference cabinets to companies while licensing chip IP externally. The company was founded by Bernardo Kastrup and Atul Sinha at the Eindhoven High Tech Campus, and the core of the roadmap is two products: Craftwerk, which claims to be the world's first agentic AI chip, and Craftwerk Station CWS 32, which claims to be the lowest-power exascale AI factory.
Samsung and Europe each take what they need
Samsung is the only manufacturer in the world that has both storage, logic foundry, and advanced packaging capabilities. HBM's share has rebounded from 15% in the second quarter of 2025 to 33% in the second quarter of 2026, and Samsung is OpenAI Jalapeño's exclusive supplier of HBM4.
Investing in an inference chip company that focuses on “processor-memory co-design” is tantamount to finding a technology buyer and ecological portal for its HBM4 production capacity and 4nm logic production line — Kastrup himself said that Samsung can provide far more than money, as well as storage capacity, engineering, and supply chain.
Implementation of the 2030 production capacity target of the European Chip Act is generally lagging behind. What Europe lacks is not a lithography machine, but a chip product company that can combine the ASML, NXP, and imec ecosystems. Wennink became the chairman of the board and the Danish and Belgian national capital entered the market. Essentially, Europe is making up for the shortcomings of large-scale design.