Samsung has joined a $230 million funding round for Dutch artificial intelligence chip startup Euclyd, backing an emerging challenger to Nvidia as demand for alternatives to the market leader’s processors accelerates. The Series A round, worth €200 million, was co-led by Samsung and is aimed at developing AI inference chips and systems designed to compete with Nvidia’s GPU based infrastructure, according to CNBC Africa and Dealroom.
Euclyd is developing a specialised architecture focused on AI inference, the stage at which trained AI models generate responses and perform tasks for users. The company’s proposition is centred on improving computing efficiency and reducing the energy requirements associated with running AI workloads in data centres. The scale of the investment reflects growing investor interest in specialised AI silicon as businesses seek alternatives that can reduce costs and address the rapidly expanding demand for inference capacity.
The investment also has strategic relevance for Samsung, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, as competition across the AI hardware ecosystem broadens beyond Nvidia’s dominant GPU platform. The funding comes amid a wider surge in capital flowing into AI chip companies, with startups such as Positron also securing substantial new investment as the industry shifts increasingly towards inference and AI agents. At the same time, semiconductor supply chains remain under pressure, particularly around high bandwidth memory, a critical component of advanced AI processors.
Samsung’s investment signals that the next phase of the AI infrastructure race may be less about finding a single Nvidia replacement and more about building a diversified chip ecosystem tailored to different workloads. For investors and technology companies, the opportunity is expanding across processors, memory, networking and energy efficient data centre infrastructure. Euclyd will still face the difficult task of turning its technology into commercially competitive products, but Samsung’s backing gives the Dutch startup additional financial and industrial credibility as the global market for AI computing continues to expand.
