A European dream clashes with hard financial reality
In Eindhoven’s AI Innovation Center at the High Tech Campus, Bernardo Kastrup speaks with the calm of someone who has lived multiple lives—computer scientist, philosopher, ASML strategist, founder, and now, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, the face of Europe’s most ambitious attempt to reinvent AI computing from the ground up.
Euclyd, the company he launched just over a year ago, has quickly become a talking point. Backed by heavyweight names—former ASML CEO Peter Wennink, famed Intel engineer Federico Faggin, Silicon Hive’s Atul Sinha, and Elastic founder Steven Schuurman—the startup emerged from stealth earlier this year and immediately dominated discussions. It wasn’t just the ambition; it was the tone—confident, technical, unapologetically grand—a European company speaking with Silicon Valley-level swagger.
“ Yes, you can call it bragging,” Kastrup jokes. “It’s tongue-in-cheek. But confidence is warranted. Why should Americans have a monopoly on ambition?”
Beneath the humor lies a deeper frustration that sparked Euclyd’s creation.
“I looked around and asked: Who allowed this to happen?”
When generative AI burst into public awareness in 2023, Kastrup began surveying Europe’s landscape. He saw world-class researchers, cutting-edge chip equipment, a sophisticated industrial base, and no serious effort to build the next-generation silicon powering future data-center AI.
“I remember wanting to blame someone,” he says. “Why is nothing happening in Europe? How did we let this go on?”
The harsh truth quickly emerged: there was no one else to blame. “Who could step up? People like me. People I know. So yes, a sense of responsibility settled in.”
That sense of duty pushed him into stealth mode for months. Euclyd would reveal nothing until the idea proved real—not just to him, but to trusted friends and potential investors. “If a venture capital-backed project fails, that’s business risk,” he notes. “But losing friends’ money—that’s different.”
For a long period, a small team—many veterans from earlier chip ventures—worked on a radically new AI inference architecture. No GPU forgery, no repurposed gaming hardware, no shortcuts. A system designed from the ground up for neural inference. Early work even happened in Kastrup’s attic, where a personal simulator and many long nights were spent sketching microarchitectures as others draft ideas in notebooks.
When the prototype test chip finally appeared and Samsung agreed to manufacture it, Euclyd stepped into the spotlight.
A European chip with world-class ambitions
Euclyd’s promise is immense: ultra-efficient AI inference, potentially orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than Nvidia’s current data-center chips, achieved not by magic but through architectural discipline.
“Nvidia was built for video games,” Kastrup argues. “When large language models arrived, they were in the right place at the right time. But treating a neural network as a video game with a global variable space is simply the worst approach for efficiency.”
Euclyd’s architecture buckles the conventional approach: no reuse of off-the-shelf IP, no reliance on generic bus designs. Everything is specialized, deeply pipelined, and engineered for neural inference first. The test chip houses 64 processors; the eventual product is planned to scale to 16,384.
In an era of incremental improvements, Euclyd is attempting the audacious move of starting over.
The dream: a European Nvidia. The reality: global capital
Yet behind the technical bravado lies one big, difficult topic that makes Kastrup pause and speak more as a founder navigating big forces than as an engineer: money.
Euclyd is seeking a major financing round. With that round comes the possibility—perhaps even the likelihood—that the company will no longer be strictly European in ownership.
“The original dream was to build AI in Europe,” he says softly. “To have Europe compete in that space. But when running a business means spending other people’s money, fiduciary duties come into play. That may push us toward decisions that don’t fully align with the pure dream.”
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening now. “We’re raising money,” he concedes. “This is a situation we may face—and perhaps have already confronted. That’s part of the game.”
He pauses. “I can dream, right? I can envision whatever I want. But I can’t, on my own, guarantee that the dream will become or stay true. The world isn’t entirely under control.”
That candid admission stands out in Europe’s tech scene, which often clings to idealism. Kastrup refuses to pretend the tension doesn’t exist. He wants Euclyd to be Europe’s Nvidia, built on European engineering and anchored in the Brainport ecosystem that shaped him. But he also wants the company to survive the global race for compute—a race Europe is late to join and underprepared for.
If the right investors come from outside Europe, and rejecting them would jeopardize the company’s competitiveness, what should a founder do?
“I’ll do the best I can within the bounds of what is permissible for someone in my position,” he says. “But control over everything isn’t possible.”
A dream worth fighting for
Whether Euclyd remains European in ownership is still unclear. Whether its technology becomes globally deployed seems increasingly likely. And whether Europe will finally have its own AI-compute champion may hinge not only on Kastrup’s technical brilliance but also on Europe’s willingness to move at global speed.
Still, the dream persists. “Europe must play in this field,” he asserts. “It’s something I want, too.”
With that, Bernardo Kastrup—philosopher, engineer, founder—returns to his office, where a tiny test chip, no larger than a fingernail, sits idle. The architecture inside could reshape AI’s global energy footprint. The question remains: will Europe still be the place where that future unfolds?
