Dutch Chip Startup Secures Major Investment to Challenge Nvidia

2026-09-16 semicon

Eindhoven, Wednesday 16 September 2026
Eindhoven’s Euclyd has raised over €200 million to build ultra-efficient AI hardware, appointing former ASML chief Peter Wennink as chairman to help challenge Nvidia’s market dominance.

A Landmark Funding Round in the Eindhoven Hub

On 14 September 2026, Eindhoven-based semiconductor startup Euclyd announced the successful closure of a Series A funding round exceeding €200 million, which equates to approximately $231 million [2][3]. Co-led by Samsung Electronics, Somerset Capital Partners, the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund, and Innovation Industries, the round also attracted significant backing from Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund (EIFO), imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency (BOM), and Quadri [3][6]. This massive injection of capital represents one of the largest early-stage semiconductor rounds in the Benelux ecosystem, highlighting the region’s capacity to anchor high-tech ventures [GPT]. The funding will be deployed to expand Euclyd’s engineering workforce, accelerate its hardware roadmaps, and prepare for commercial deployment [1][3].

The Wennink Effect and Capital Acceleration

A major catalyst for this record-breaking round was the appointment of Peter Wennink as Euclyd’s non-executive chairman of the board [2]. Wennink, who retired in 2024 after leading the Dutch lithography giant ASML as President and CEO since 2013, brings decades of deep industry expertise to the young startup [2]. His involvement reportedly doubled the funding amount Euclyd originally sought [5]. The company had initially targeted at least €100 million in April 2026, which rose to a €200 million target by June 2026, building upon an initial seed round of under €10 million [5]. This represents a funding target increase of 100 per cent within just a few months, demonstrating surging investor confidence [5].

Breaking the Efficiency Wall in AI Inference

Founded in 2024 at High Tech Campus Eindhoven by Bernardo Kastrup, Atul Sinha, and a team of seasoned engineers, Euclyd is developing custom silicon and data-centre systems designed to provide an ultra-efficient alternative to Nvidia’s dominant graphics processing units (GPUs) [1][5]. While Nvidia currently controls an estimated 80 per cent of the global AI training chip market, the broader AI chip market is projected to expand from approximately $100 billion in 2026 to over $400 billion by 2030, representing a growth of 300 per cent [5]. Euclyd plans to capture a slice of this booming market by focusing specifically on the energy-intensive AI inference sector, where power and memory bandwidth constraints pose severe bottlenecks to scaling foundation models [2][3].

Custom Silicon and Exascale Architecture

Euclyd’s technical platform is designed around two core elements: the ‘craftwerk’ programmable agentic AI processor and the ‘CRAFTWERK Station CWS’ [1][2]. The station is a rack-scale computing system that combines 32 craftwerk chips, with each individual chip containing 16,384 custom processors, resulting in a total of 524288 processors per rack [5]. The startup claims this architecture will deliver the world’s lowest-power exascale AI factory, aiming to reach one exaflop of compute power by 2028 [1][5]. Furthermore, Euclyd projects that its technology will offer up to 100 times the power efficiency of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, although management acknowledges these figures are company-supplied projections rather than results demonstrated at commercial scale [2][5].

Strengthening European Strategic Autonomy

The emergence of Euclyd is a significant step forward for European strategic autonomy and supply chain resilience within the semiconductor value chain [GPT]. By leveraging Eindhoven’s dense hardware ecosystem—which includes equipment giants like ASML and ASM, alongside integrated photonics initiatives like PhotonDelta—Euclyd highlights how European startups can translate regional strengths into globally competitive platforms [6][GPT]. As Peter Wennink noted, Europe possesses world-class capabilities across advanced manufacturing, systems engineering, and semiconductors [6]. The startup aims to begin rolling out physical chip systems in 2028 and serve thousands of enterprise customers by 2030 [2]. It is already in discussions with four prospective customers, aiming to commence supply to two of them as early as 2027 [5].

Sources & Ecosystem Partners

Semiconductor investment Artificial intelligence hardware