The Pulse
EUCLYD Raises More Than €200 Million for AI Inference Systems
Dutch semiconductor company EUCLYD has closed a Series A round worth more than €200 million to develop energy-efficient AI inference hardware. Samsung, EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, Somerset Capital Partners and Innovation Industries co-led th
AI.info Team ·
EUCLYD has closed a Series A financing round worth more than €200 million, giving the Eindhoven semiconductor company capital to develop hardware designed specifically for AI inference.
Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries co-led the round, announced on September 15, 2026. EIFO, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency and Quadri also participated. Former ASML President and CEO Peter Wennink joins EUCLYD as chairman of the board.
The company says the financing will expand its engineering team, accelerate its silicon and systems roadmap, strengthen partnerships and prepare its products for enterprise, sovereign and hyperscale AI deployments. EUCLYD announced the round through PR Newswire.
EUCLYD Targets the Cost of Running Foundation Models
EUCLYD is building a platform that combines custom compute, memory architecture and data-center systems. Its argument is that the economics of AI increasingly depend on what happens after a model has been trained: every response requires power, memory bandwidth and infrastructure capacity.
“AI is becoming a foundation of economic growth, scientific discovery, and national competitiveness, but its potential will remain constrained unless we fundamentally change the infrastructure beneath it,” Bernardo Kastrup, EUCLYD’s founder and chief executive, said in the announcement.
Kastrup said the new financing would support the company’s effort to reduce cost per token and broaden access to advanced AI. EUCLYD describes that goal as “Abundant Intelligence,” referring to a future in which infrastructure cost, available power and location impose fewer limits on AI deployment.
Samsung and European Funds Back the Hardware Bet
Samsung is among the round’s lead investors, alongside Somerset Capital Partners, Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries. The participation gives EUCLYD backing from a major semiconductor manufacturer as well as European funds focused on deep technology and industrial scale-up.
Dede Goldschmidt, Samsung Electronics’ senior vice president and head of the Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center, said the next stage of AI would depend on infrastructure efficiency as well as model development.
“The next phase of AI will be defined not only by model innovation, but also by the efficiency and scalability of its infrastructure,”
Dede Goldschmidt, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics and head of the Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center
Ted Persson, a partner at EQT and co-head of the Scaleup Europe Fund, said EUCLYD combines semiconductor expertise with an effort to address difficult constraints in AI infrastructure. The fund is targeting €5 billion and invests across deep technology, AI and life sciences, according to the company’s release.
Craftwerk Sits at the Center of the Roadmap
EUCLYD’s product roadmap centers on craftwerk, which the company calls “agentic AI silicon,” and craftwerk station CWS, a rack-scale system it describes as a low-power exascale AI factory.
The platform combines programmable application-specific integrated circuit compute with processor-memory co-design and system-level optimization. EUCLYD says the approach is intended to address the movement of data between processing and memory, a major factor in the power use and operating cost of large-scale inference systems.
The company was founded by Kastrup and Atul Sinha at High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Its headquarters are in Eindhoven, where EUCLYD says it is drawing on the local semiconductor ecosystem and engineering base.
Peter Wennink Brings ASML Experience to the Board
Wennink joins EUCLYD after serving as president and chief executive of ASML. His appointment gives the startup a chairman with experience leading a European semiconductor equipment company through global expansion and a highly specialized manufacturing market.
“Europe possesses world-class capabilities across semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and systems engineering,” Wennink said. “EUCLYD can transform those strengths into a globally competitive AI infrastructure platform.”
The company has not disclosed the ownership structure of the financing or provided a detailed timetable for commercial shipments in the announcement. Its stated near-term priorities are engineering expansion, silicon development, ecosystem partnerships and preparation for commercial deployment.
The Next Test Is Commercial Silicon
EUCLYD’s financing arrives as AI infrastructure companies seek alternatives to general-purpose accelerators for inference workloads. The company is not presenting the round as a single-chip product launch; its stated plan covers compute, memory and complete data-center systems.
That scope also raises the size of the execution challenge. EUCLYD must turn its architecture into working silicon, integrate it into deployable systems and show that its claimed efficiency translates into lower operating costs for customers.
For now, the concrete milestone is the financing itself: more than €200 million committed to an Eindhoven-based company building its first commercial platform around AI inference rather than model training.