- Ayar Labs is valued at $1 billion and is at the forefront of silicon photonics
- The company has raised money from a flood of investors, including Intel and Global Foundries.
- He says copper has almost reached its physical limitations for chip interconnects and now he wants to see what’s next
The rapid expansion of AI has posed unprecedented challenges to the movement of data within AI infrastructure, particularly for traditional copper interconnects, which were once sufficient for data transfer but are now struggling to meet demands. of increasingly complex AI models.
This bottleneck has led to inefficiencies in computing performance, power consumption, and overall scalability, and addressing these issues is crucial as AI adoption continues to grow across industries, requiring a more efficient solution for manage the massive data flows required for AI training and inference.
Ayar Labs, an optical interconnect technology startup founded in 2015, is taking a step forward to address this challenge and the company recently announced the completion of a $155 million Series D funding round with investments from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia, raising its total financing. to $370 million and raises its valuation to more than $1 billion.
Ayar Labs seeks a fundamental role
The funding aims to accelerate Ayar Labs’ high-volume manufacturing of integrated optical interconnects, a technology designed to replace traditional electrical I/O and overcome the limitations of copper and pluggable optics.
Ayar Labs optical I/O technology eliminates traditional interconnection bottlenecks by enabling data movement at the speeds required for large-scale AI workloads. By reducing latency, power consumption and operational costs, the technology helps optimize AI infrastructure, making it more efficient and cost-effective.
“Major GPU suppliers (AMD and Nvidia) and semiconductor foundries (GlobalFoundries, Intel Foundry and TSMC) combined with the backing of Advent, Light Street and our other investors underscore the potential of our optical I/O technology to redefine the future. of AI infrastructure,” said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs.
With AI infrastructure expected to attract more than $1 trillion in investments over the next decade, Ayar Labs hopes to play a critical role in shaping its future. The company says it has shipped around 15,000 units of its TeraPHY optical transport and SuperNova laser source to select customers to date, but expects this number to grow to more than 100 million units annually by 2028. The latest financing will allow the company expand its manufacturing capabilities and drive customer engagement, the company says.
Things look promising for Ayar Labs right now, but as TheNextPlatform notes: “It’s tempting to think that the investments by Nvidia, AMD and Intel portend that these companies are looking to implement TeraPHY optical transport and its SuperNova laser source in some way in their compute engines. This may be true, but it’s also true that by investing, these companies can get an inside look at what Ayar Labs is doing and move to the front of the line if they decide to implement their technology in some way. We know that Hewlett Packard Enterprise signed a strategic investment and collaboration agreement with Ayar Labs in February 2022 to add silicon photonics to its Slingshot “Rosetta” interconnect. But don’t jump to conclusions based on funding.”
