UK Startup OLIX Raises $312M for Photonic AI Inference Chips — Europe's Largest-Ever Semiconductor Round
Summary: OLIX, a London startup founded in 2024, closed a $312 million Series B on August 3, 2026 — Europe's biggest-ever semiconductor round — to commercialize photonic-interconnect AI inference chips that skip the costly HBM stack.
Key Facts
- Investors include Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, and Reed Hastings (Netflix co-founder) as angel; backed by UK Government's Sovereign AI venture fund
- Architecture: dedicated accelerators for each token-generation stage, connected via a proprietary "slow and wide" photonic interconnect — eliminates HBM bottlenecks and cuts power draw
- First inference accelerator, DX-1, targeting initial customer deliveries in H2 2027
- Founded March 2024 by James Dacombe, then 24 years old; reached $3.3B valuation in two years
Why It Matters
As AI clusters grow, the memory bandwidth wall — not raw compute — is increasingly the bottleneck. OLIX's photonic interconnect approach trades traditional DRAM bandwidth for broader, lower-latency optical links, a structural bet on power and cost efficiency at scale. The round also signals that Europe's AI hardware ambitions are real capital, not just policy statements — and that institutional backing for non-NVIDIA paths to AI inference is no longer purely speculative.
More
- Chip startup Olix raises $312m at $3.3bn valuation — Data Center Dynamics
- OLIX Raises $312M for Photonic AI Chip That Ditches HBM — TechTimes