Euclyd wants to raise €100 million and take on Nvidia
European startups such as Euclyd are seeking hundreds of millions to break Nvidia’s dominance in AI inference.
The European chip sector is experiencing unprecedented growth driven by the enormous demand for artificial intelligence. While American giant Nvidia firmly controls the market for training AI models, European challengers sense an opportunity in the next phase: AI inference. This is the process in which trained models actually perform tasks for users. Dutch company Euclyd is leading the charge. The company is backed, among others, by Peter Wennink, the former CEO of chip machine maker ASML. Euclyd is currently in talks with investors for a funding round of at least €100 million, the company said in an interview with CNBC. This capital injection is needed to challenge the established order in Silicon Valley.
The stakes are high because the winner will determine how efficiently and autonomously Europe’s digital infrastructure will function in the near future.
The shift from training to inference
The current AI market no longer revolves solely around training enormous language models. The focus is rapidly shifting to AI inference, meaning the practical use of these models. Nvidia is currently the most valuable company in the world thanks to its graphics processors (GPUs). These chips were originally designed for gaming but turned out to be extremely well-suited for AI training.
However, this architecture has disadvantages when used at scale for inference. Existing GPUs consume enormous amounts of energy because they constantly move data back and forth between memory and the compute core. Euclyd says it is building technology that handles this process far more efficiently. According to Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky of the NATO Innovation Fund, the current architecture was simply not built for the scale now required.
The geopolitical situation reinforces this trend. Export controls and the concentration of production at TSMC are forcing Europe to invest in its own sovereign computing power. This creates a unique opportunity for local players to offer an alternative to American dominance.
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Euclyd wants to raise €100 million and take on Nvidia, source
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