UK chip startup OLIX secures $312M to scale frontier inference, and it matters for crypto’s AI play

Olix Computing, a UK-based startup building photonic AI chips, just closed a $312 million Series B that values the company at $3.3 billion. That is a staggering jump from roughly $1 billion just months ago, when the company raised $220 million in February 2026. Olix, formerly known as Flux Computing before rebranding in January 2026, makes what it calls Optical Tensor Processing Units, or OTPUs. Think of them as chips that use light instead of electricity to process the math that powers AI models. Traditional GPUs from Nvidia crunch AI workloads using electrons flowing through silicon. Olix wants to do the same thing with photons, which travel faster and generate less heat. The company claims this approach is faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than conventional GPU setups. The key innovation is eliminating the need for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is the expensive and supply-constrained component that makes Nvidia’s data center GPUs so costly. Olix’s architecture reimagines the data center as what the company describes as a “token factory,” essentially a facility purpose-built for churning out AI inference at scale. The founder behind all of this is James Dacombe, a...