Olix raises $3.3B valuation in Europe’s largest chip funding round

A 25-year-old founder just pulled off Europe’s biggest semiconductor funding round. Olix Computing, a UK-based startup building photonic AI chips, closed a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion post-money valuation, making it the continent’s most valuable chip company by fundraising metrics. The company was founded in 2024 and only rebranded from Flux Computing in January 2026. That timeline, from incorporation to multi-billion-dollar valuation in roughly two years, puts it in rarefied territory usually reserved for Silicon Valley darlings. The tech behind the valuation Olix isn’t building another general-purpose GPU. The company is developing what it calls Optical Tensor Processing Units, or OTPUs, which use photonic technology instead of traditional electronic circuits to process AI workloads. Its flagship chip, the DX-1, is designed specifically for decode acceleration in AI inference. The company claims it can deliver over 10,000 tokens per second per user. OTPUs eliminate the need for High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. That’s the specialized memory component that has been one of the tightest bottlenecks in the semiconductor industry, with companies like SK Hynix struggling to me...