European AI Chip Startups Raise Funds to Challenge Nvidia GPUs for AI Inference

Gate News message, April 17 — European AI chip startups are securing larger funding rounds as investors seek alternatives to Nvidia GPUs for AI inference workloads. Dutch startup Euclyd is in talks to raise at least 100 million euros (US$118 million) to scale its multi-chiplet inference system technology and expand its customer base.

Euclyd, founded in 2024 by former ASML director Bernardo Kastrup, has previously raised less than 10 million euros (US$11.8 million). Other European startups including Optalysys, Fractile, and Arago are also pursuing funding rounds. According to Dealroom, European AI chip startups have raised approximately US$800 million so far in 2026, significantly trailing US peers who have raised US$4.7 billion during the same period.

Many European startups are focusing on AI inference—the phase where trained models generate responses—rather than training, targeting a market segment that generated approximately US$1.39 billion in 2025. Fractile and similar companies are developing in-memory computing architectures, which process data inside memory to reduce latency and power consumption. The European Chips Act, a 43 billion euro (US$50.7 billion) European Union initiative, aims to boost semiconductor manufacturing and raise Europe's global semiconductor market share to 20% by 2030.