# OLIX Computing Series B: $312M at $3.3B Valuation for Photonic AI Chips

> OLIX Computing, a London-based chip startup, has raised a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation, which it says is the largest semiconductor venture round ever led by a European company. The money backs an unusual bet: processors that compute with light instead of electricity. OLIX's optical tensor processing units, or OTPUs, use photonics to run AI inference, and the company claims its DX-1 chip can push more than 10,000 tokens per second on a 100-billion-parameter model while ditching the expensive high-bandwidth memory that today's GPUs depend on. If that holds up in production, it could attack both the cost and the power draw of running large models. The catch is timing. The DX-1 is not slated to ship until the second half of 2027, so this is a long bet on a hard problem, and photonic computing has promised more than it has delivered for years. But the size of the round signals real conviction that light-based inference is worth chasing, and Europe rarely produces semiconductor bets this large.

_Section: [AI Funding Tracker](https://www.wortins.com/funding) · Source: TechTimes · Published Monday, August 17, 2026_

## Wortins' read

OLIX Computing, a London-based chip startup, has raised a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation, which it says is the largest semiconductor venture round ever led by a European company. The money backs an unusual bet: processors that compute with light instead of electricity. OLIX's optical tensor processing units, or OTPUs, use photonics to run AI inference, and the company claims its DX-1 chip can push more than 10,000 tokens per second on a 100-billion-parameter model while ditching the expensive high-bandwidth memory that today's GPUs depend on. If that holds up in production, it could attack both the cost and the power draw of running large models. The catch is timing. The DX-1 is not slated to ship until the second half of 2027, so this is a long bet on a hard problem, and photonic computing has promised more than it has delivered for years. But the size of the round signals real conviction that light-based inference is worth chasing, and Europe rarely produces semiconductor bets this large.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechTimes](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322816/20260803/olix-raises-312m-photonic-ai-chip-that-ditches-hbm-britains-biggest-semiconductor-bet.htm)

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