❯ Salience Labs raises a $125 million Series B for all-optical switch chips that speed up AI data centers

Intel and AMD both inAccording to SiliconANGLE, silicon photonics company Salience Labs raised a $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with Intel Capital and AMD Ventures as strategic investors and SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank joining as new backers.

Keeping data as lightSalience Labs makes network switch chips for data centers. Today’s fabrics convert optical signals to electrical ones for switching and then back to optical, adding latency and power at every conversion; its all-optical switch routes data as light directly on the chip. In September the company showed a 64-port all-optical switch, with 128- and 256-port versions in development. Its CEO is co-founder Vaysh Kewada.

The network bottleneck in giant clustersThe report says that as GPU clusters grow to tens of thousands of chips, electronic switch fabrics cannot keep up with bandwidth needs, making latency and power consumption bottlenecks. Industry analyst Cignal AI expects the optical circuit switching market to exceed $8 billion by the end of the decade. The money will go to volume manufacturing, market expansion and R&D on higher-density switches; no customers have been disclosed.

▮ SIGNALAs AI clusters grow, the bottleneck shifts from computing fast to moving data fast, and the links between GPUs are becoming the next chip category worth betting on.