Key points
- Samsung co-led a $230 million round for Euclyd
- The startup skips HBM for its own memory design
- Former ASML chief Peter Wennink is chairman
- No chip systems ship until 2028
Samsung Electronics is one of four co-leads in a $230 million funding round for Euclyd, a two-year-old Dutch company building an AI inference chip meant to compete with Nvidia (NVDA). The round, more than 200 million euros, was announced on Monday and reported by CNBC. Somerset Capital Partners, the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries are the other co-leads, according to Euclyd's funding release, which describes the round as a Series A.
Euclyd's design aims to replace high-bandwidth memory, one of Samsung's main AI products, with its own memory design.
What Euclyd is building
Euclyd's chip is a package it calls Craftwerk, with 16,384 custom SIMD processors on a silicon interposer about 100mm on a side. The processors are not Arm or RISC-V designs. The company puts 1 TB of what it calls Ultra Bandwidth Memory in the package, claiming 8,000 TB/s of bandwidth, and rates a single unit at up to 8 PFLOPS at FP16 and 32 PFLOPS at FP4, at about 3 kW TDP.
The memory choice is deliberate. "HBM addresses SRAM's capacity weakness, but its bandwidth, despite its name, is not high enough for what Euclyd wants to achieve," Ingolf Held, a co-founder and vice president of product, told EE Times when the company came out of stealth last September.
None of it has shipped. Euclyd says the physical systems roll out in 2028, with thousands of enterprise customers by 2030, which puts commercial hardware shipments at least two years out and leaves the performance claims untested at commercial scale.
Why Samsung is in it
Samsung is one of the three largest HBM makers, and Euclyd's pitch is that HBM is not fast enough. Chief executive Bernardo Kastrup, who worked as a technology strategist at ASML and founded the processor company Silicon Hive, framed the investor as a supplier rather than a rival. "Samsung can help us in more ways than money. They are one of the biggest memory manufacturers in the world," he told CNBC.
Dede Goldschmidt, a Samsung senior vice president, put the company's reasoning in the funding release: "The next phase of AI will be defined by infrastructure efficiency and scalability, not just model innovation."
This is the second AI investment Samsung has announced this month. Samsung led Mistral AI's 3 billion euro round a week ago and is putting those models inside its own chip business.
Peter Wennink, who ran ASML (ASML) as chief executive until 2024, joins Euclyd as chairman of the board. He was already a seed investor, alongside Federico Faggin, who co-designed the first commercial microprocessor, and Elastic founder Steven Schuurman. The other backers in this round include EIFO, the Danish export and investment fund, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency and Quadri.
"Europe possesses world-class capabilities that EUCLYD can transform into competitive AI infrastructure," Wennink said in the same release.
