Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs fills its wallet to mass-produce CPO chiplets

It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.

On Tuesday, Nvidia-backed startup Ayar Labs raised $500 million to accelerate the mass production of its co-packaged optics (CPO) tech.

The cash infusion comes a day after Nvidia said it would inject $4 billion into photonic networking providers Coherent and Lumentum ($2 billion each) to scale up their manufacturing capacity in anticipation of demand.

Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs' TeraPHY chiplets provide an alternative to copper for chip-to-chip communications that's capable of supporting higher bandwidths over longer distances.

Above 800 Gbps, copper interconnects are limited to a couple of meters and often require retimers to keep error rates from getting out of hand. Because of this, higher-speed copper interconnects, like those found in Nvidia's NVL72 systems, are usually constrained to the rack while pluggable optics are used for ...