❯ Salience Labs raises $125 million to expand production of optical switches for data centers

Chip giants investSalience Labs announced on October 14 an oversubscribed $125 million Series B. Bullhound Capital led; AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank joined, with existing investors including Applied Ventures and Oxford Science Enterprises.

Switching with lightThousands of GPUs in an AI data center constantly exchange data. The usual approach converts light to electrical signals, switches them electronically, then converts back, wasting power and time. Salience Labs’ silicon photonic switches keep data as light while switching, skipping those conversions, which SiliconANGLE says cuts latency and power significantly.

Out of an Oxford labFounded in 2021 and led by CEO and co-founder Vaysh Kewada, the company builds on more than a decade of research at Oxford and Münster universities. It demonstrated a 64-port all-optical switch at ECOC 2026, calling it a first for silicon photonics; the money funds 128- and 256-port versions and volume production with Keysight and Tower Semiconductor.

How big the market isThe announcement cites Dell’Oro’s forecast that cumulative spending on AI back-end data center switches could approach $1 trillion over 2026–2030; SiliconANGLE cites Cignal AI’s forecast that optical circuit switching will exceed $8 billion by the end of the decade.

More GPUs still get stuck in trafficIf the network can’t keep up, expensive GPUs sit idle waiting for data. If optical switching saves power and time in real data centers, cluster builders will replace some conventional switches, which is why AMD and Intel invest. Going from a show prototype to volume deployment still means clearing manufacturing and reliability hurdles.

▮ SIGNALThe next bottleneck in the compute race is the network, and keeping GPUs from waiting on data is a business worth betting on.