AMD, Intel and Nvidia invest in optical I/O firm Ayar Labs

After a recent 155-million-dollar investment round, which saw participation from AMD, Intel and Nvidia, among others, the valuation of US silicon photonics startup Ayar Labs rose to 1 billion dollars. Ayar has developed an in-package optical I/O solution to replace electrical I/O, removing a bottleneck in high-performance computing tasks such as AI training. Delivered as a chiplet that can be integrated in customers’ system-on-chip packages, the startup claims 5-10x higher bandwidth, 4-8x better power efficiency and 10x lower latency. So far, the company has raised 370 million dollars.