- Optical interconnect designer Ayar Labs raised $155 million
Ayar Labs Inc., which specializes in using light to transfer data between chips, scored investment from the three biggest US semiconductor designers as the industry pursues more efficient AI processing.
The San Jose, California-based company said it raised $155 million from Nvidia Corp., AMD Ventures and Intel Capital in a funding round led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital. With this investment, Ayar Labs’ valuation exceeded $1 billion, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Wade told Bloomberg News.
The artificial intelligence boom has been a power-hungry and expensive venture to fund. The technology enabling it, primarily Nvidia graphics processing units designed to handle many simultaneous tasks at once, demands the rapid and constant transmission of data in server systems. That creates bottlenecks, requires plenty of power and generates significant heat in operation. Ayar Labs’ solution to these challenges uses light, or photons, to speed up data transmission.
“The AI workload is really breaking the back of the existing hardware infrastructure, especially in interconnects,” said Wade. “We’ve come up with a way to replace those electrical interconnects.”
Light has been used for decades to carry data, such as in the subsea fiber optic cables connecting continents. Ayar Labs has shrunk the technology by several orders of magnitude to fit it into a chip package.
Wade said customers are already trying out Ayar Labs’ chips and he aims to have them qualified for high-volume manufacturing by mid-2026. The money raised in this round will be used to scale up production, he said.
Today, the chips are manufactured at GlobalFoundries Inc. and Ayar Labs has also worked with Intel Corp. to integrate its technology into the Santa Clara firm’s manufacturing offerings. Wade’s startup is also talking to industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
VentureTech Alliance, which has a strategic partnership with TSMC, is an existing investor in Ayar Labs. TSMC was part of a group of companies that launched a silicon photonics industry alliance this year to help accelerate the use of the technology, including in chip packaging.
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Ayar Labs Inc., which specializes in using light to transfer data between chips, scored investment from the three biggest US semiconductor designers as the industry pursues more efficient AI processing.
The San Jose, California-based company said it raised $155 million from Nvidia Corp., AMD Ventures and Intel Capital in a funding round led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital. With this investment, Ayar Labs’ valuation exceeded $1 billion, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Wade told Bloomberg News.
The artificial intelligence boom has been a power-hungry and expensive venture to fund. The technology enabling it, primarily Nvidia graphics processing units designed to handle many simultaneous tasks at once, demands the rapid and constant transmission of data in server systems. That creates bottlenecks, requires plenty of power and generates significant heat in operation. Ayar Labs’ solution to these challenges uses light, or photons, to speed up data transmission.
“The AI workload is really breaking the back of the existing hardware infrastructure, especially in interconnects,” said Wade. “We’ve come up with a way to replace those electrical interconnects.”
Light has been used for decades to carry data, such as in the subsea fiber optic cables connecting continents. Ayar Labs has shrunk the technology by several orders of magnitude to fit it into a chip package.
Wade said customers are already trying out Ayar Labs’ chips and he aims to have them qualified for high-volume manufacturing by mid-2026. The money raised in this round will be used to scale up production, he said.
Today, the chips are manufactured at GlobalFoundries Inc. and Ayar Labs has also worked with Intel Corp. to integrate its technology into the Santa Clara firm’s manufacturing offerings. Wade’s startup is also talking to industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
VentureTech Alliance, which has a strategic partnership with TSMC, is an existing investor in Ayar Labs. TSMC was part of a group of companies that launched a silicon photonics industry alliance this year to help accelerate the use of the technology, including in chip packaging.
Podcast EP69: Ayar Labs and the Future of Optical I/O - Semiwiki
Dan is joined by Hugo Saleh, senior VP of commercial operations and managing director of Ayar Labs, UK. Hugo discusses the technology and application of optical I/O, its use and impact now and in the future. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in these podcasts belong solely to the...
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