A London startup two years old has just become one of Britain’s boldest bets against Nvidia. Olix has raised $312m and tripled its valuation to $3.3bn in six months. Its founder, James Dacombe, is 25. And its pitch has a timely twist: a chip that skips the very parts the rest of the industry is fighting over.

The New York firm Fundomo led the Series B, Sifted reported. Arm, the quant trading firm Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings also took part. So did the UK government, through its Sovereign AI fund, which counts Olix as one of its first bets. The round values the company at more than triple its February mark of about $1bn.

Dacombe’s pitch is that the age of one chip doing everything is ending. The industry is “moving into a world of specialists,” he told the FT. He likens an AI data centre to a factory whose product is the token. Making one token takes hundreds of operations with different hardware needs, yet every stage runs on one general-purpose chip.

Olix wants to give each stage its own machine. Its X-1 platform spreads a model across several specialised chips, wired together by an optical network that moves data with light rather than copper. The first chip, DX-1, handles the stage where a model writes its output. For very large models, Olix claims it can run faster and on less power than a general-purpose part.

The timely part: it dodges the shortage

The detail that matters most right now is what Olix’s chips leave out. The DX-1 uses no high-bandwidth memory and no advanced packaging, the company says, holding a model in fast on-chip memory instead. Those happen to be the components in shortest supply, the squeeze now pushing up prices on everything from laptops to phones.

The pedigree around the founder is heavy for a company this young. Olix has put Nick McKeown, a Stanford professor who helped invent modern networking, on its board. Its new finance chief, Matt Briers, spent nine years as chief financial officer of Wise and took the fintech public. The firm now has more than 140 staff across the UK, US and Canada.

Still a bet, not a product

For all the momentum, Olix has not shipped a chip. It plans to finish its design later this year and reach its first customers in 2027, selling the silicon inside a full server rack. Only then will its headline performance claims be tested against real workloads, rather than a pitch deck.

It is also small next to its American rivals. Etched is valued at $10.3bn and SambaNova at around $11bn, and both dwarf Olix’s $3.3bn. The public markets are wary too, with chip stocks jittery over how much debt is funding the AI build-out.

Investors are betting the market is big enough to carry more than a few winners. AI chips are worth roughly $84bn this year and could approach $1tn early next decade, and money keeps pouring into AI hardware. For the UK, Olix is a rare shot at owning a slice of it. Whether the silicon delivers is the only number that will settle it.

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