‘Copper’s time is up’: Nvidia, AMD and TSMC have invested millions in a startup that may hold the key to faster chip connectivity to quench AI’s thirst for bytes
- Ayar Labs is valued at $1 billion and is at the forefront of silicon photonics
- The company has raised money from a wave of investors, including Intel and Global Foundries
- It says copper has almost reached its physical limits for chip interconnects, and now it wants to see what’s next
The rapid expansion of AI has brought unprecedented challenges to data movement within AI infrastructure, especially for traditional copper connections, which were once sufficient for data transfer but are now struggling to meet the demands of increasingly complex AI models.
This bottleneck has led to inefficiencies in compute performance, power consumption, and overall scalability. Addressing these issues is critical as AI adoption continues to grow across industries, requiring a more efficient solution for managing the massive data flows required for AI training and inference.
Ayar Labs, an optical interconnect technology startup founded in 2015, is committed to tackling this challenge and the company recently announced the completion of a $155 million Series D financing round with investments from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia, bringing its total funding to $370 million and pushing its valuation past $1 billion.
Ayar Labs is looking for a central role
The funding is aimed at accelerating large-scale production of Ayar Labs’ 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 needed for large-scale AI workloads. By reducing latency, energy consumption and operational costs, the technology helps optimize AI infrastructure, making it more efficient and cost-effective.
“The leading GPU vendors – AMD and Nvidia – and semiconductor foundries – GlobalFoundries, Intel Foundry and TSMC – combined with the support of Advent, Light Street and our other investors underscore the potential of our optical I/O technology to redefine the future defining AI infrastructure,” said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs.
With AI infrastructure expected to attract over $1 trillion in investment over the next decade, Ayar Labs hopes to play a crucial role in shaping the future. The company says it has shipped approximately 15,000 units of its TeraPHY optics transport and SuperNova laser source to select customers to date, but expects that number to grow to more than 100 million units per year by 2028. The latest financing will enable the company to expand its production capabilities and increase customer engagement, the company says.
Things are looking rosy for Ayar Labs right now, but there it is The NextPlatform notes: “It is tempting to think that the investments from Nvidia, AMD and Intel predict that these companies will want to deploy the TeraPHY optics transport and SuperNova laser source in their computing systems in some way. That may be true, but it’s also true that by investing, these companies can get a glimpse into what Ayar Labs is doing and move to the front lines if they choose to deploy the technology in some way. We know that Hewlett Packard Enterprise entered into a strategic investment and collaboration agreement with Ayar Labs in February 2022 to add silicon photonics to its ‘Rosetta’ Slingshot interconnect. But don’t jump to conclusions based on the funding.”