- Ayar Labs valued at $1 billion, at the forefront of silicon photonics
- The company has raised funding from a number of investors including Intel and Global Foundries
- It says copper has almost reached the physical limits of wafer interconnects, and now it wants to see what happens next
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has brought unprecedented challenges to the movement of data within artificial intelligence infrastructure. In particular, traditional copper interconnects, which were once sufficient for data transmission, are now difficult to meet the needs of increasingly complex artificial intelligence models.
This set of necks leads to inefficiencies in computing performance, energy consumption, and overall scalability. As the adoption of AI continues to grow across industries, it is critical to address these issues and more effective solutions are needed to manage AI training. and massive data flows required for inference.
Ayar Labs, an optical interconnect technology startup founded in 2015, is stepping up to address this challenge. The company recently announced the completion of a $155 million Series D financing round from investors AMD venture capital, Intel capital, and NVIDIAbringing its total financing to $370 million and a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Ayal Labs seeks key roles
The financing is intended to accelerate high-volume production of Ayar Labs’ in-package 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 interconnect bottlenecks by moving data at the speeds required for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. By reducing latency, power consumption and operating costs, the technology helps optimize AI infrastructure to make it more efficient and cost-effective.
“The support of leading GPU suppliers – AMD and Nvidia – and semiconductor foundries – GlobalFoundries, Intel Foundry and TSMC – coupled with the support of Advent, Light Street and our other investors underscores our optical I/O Technology has the potential to redefine the future.
Artificial intelligence infrastructure is expected to attract more than $1 trillion in investment over the next decade, and Ayar Labs hopes to play a key role in shaping its future. The company says it has shipped approximately 15,000 TeraPHY optical transmission and SuperNova laser sources to select customers to date, but expects that number to grow to more than 1 million units per year by 2028. able to expand the scale of its business.
The current situation in Ayal’s laboratory looks promising, but as next platform noted, “It’s easy to think that investments from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are a sign that these companies are looking to deploy TeraPHY optical transport and their SuperNova laser sources in some way in their computing engines. That may be true, but it’s equally true Yes, by investing, these companies can gain insight into what Ayar Labs is doing and get ahead of the curve if they do choose to deploy its technology in some way. HP Enterprise reached a strategic investment and cooperation agreement with Ayar Labs as early as February 2022 to add silicon photonics technology to its “Rosetta” Slingshot interconnect. But don’t jump to any conclusions based on your financial situation.