Ex-ASML CEO Joins EUCLYD as It Raises €200M+ to Cut AI Inference Costs

EUCLYD, an Eindhoven, Netherlands-based AI infrastructure company, announced a Series A financing round of more than €200 million on September 15, 2026 — one of the larger AI infrastructure raises in Europe this year.

A Notable Investor Syndicate

Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries co-led the round, with participation from EIFO (the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark), imec.xpand, Brabant Development Agency, and Quadri — a mix of strategic corporate, European growth-fund, and regional development capital.

A Chairman With Deep Chip Industry Credibility

Peter Wennink, former President and CEO of ASML — the Dutch company that supplies the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines essential to advanced chip manufacturing worldwide — joined EUCLYD as Chairman of the Board, lending significant semiconductor industry credibility to a young infrastructure startup.

The Technical Bet: Cheaper, More Efficient Inference

EUCLYD aims to improve AI inference efficiency and reduce cost and energy consumption per AI token, developing a combination of proprietary chips, memory architecture, and data center systems. Central to its roadmap is craftwerk, a proprietary chip architecture the company describes as "agentic AI silicon," alongside the craftwerk station CWS — an AI data center system designed with a strong focus on energy efficiency.

Use of Funds

EUCLYD plans to use the new funding to expand its technical teams, accelerate development of its chips and systems, and establish new partnerships within the broader AI infrastructure ecosystem.

What This Means for AI Infrastructure Costs

A well-funded challenger specifically targeting inference cost and energy efficiency per token — rather than raw training performance — is a specific signal that as AI deployment shifts from training-heavy to inference-heavy workloads at scale, per-token economics are becoming a distinct competitive battleground worth watching independently from headline chip performance claims.