London startup OLIX has closed a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation — the largest chip funding round in European history. The round is led by Fundomo, with participation from Arm, Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. Nick McKeown, co-inventor of OpenFlow, joins the board.
OLIX (formerly Flux Computing) builds optical tensor processing units — photonic chips that process data with light instead of electrons. The startup is built around a 'slow and wide' optical interconnect and says its DX-1 decode accelerator targets more than 10,000 tokens per second per user for frontier AI inference, with customer access due in the second half of 2027.
The valuation has more than tripled since February — a sign of how strongly demand has grown for alternative chip architectures as the industry wrestles with energy efficiency and the end of transistor scaling. Photonics is considered one of the most promising candidates to break AI inference's power hunger, since light generates almost no heat and moves across a network without electrical losses.
Analysts also read the round as a European statement: a continent long dependent on Asia and the US for chips is trying to build its own lead in optical inference technology. Whether OLIX can deliver on the 10,000-tokens-per-second promise remains to be seen — but the capital and the names behind the round give the startup weight.
