Ayar Labs has extended its Series E funding round to $650 million after raising an additional $150 million from an undisclosed investor, capping a year in which the silicon-photonics startup has raised more than $1 billion in outside funding to scale co-packaged optics for AI infrastructure.
How the round stacks up
The original $500 million Series E, disclosed in March, was led by Neuberger Berman with participation from Nvidia, AMD and MediaTek. A separate $225 million secondary purchase led by Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners, alongside Sequoia Global Equities, ARK Invest and Greycroft, values Ayar Labs at more than $5 billion.
Why copper is the bottleneck
Ayar Labs’ TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet and SuperNova remote laser source replace copper interconnects with fiber, delivering up to 8 Tbps per chiplet at roughly one-tenth the power of electrical I/O. Chief executive Mark Wade told Reuters the money will accelerate volume production and support a new chip design centre in Bengaluru, with mass-market deployment targeted for early 2028.
Wiwynn moves in
The extension comes as Taiwanese hyperscale supplier Wiwynn deepens a strategic investment and product partnership with Ayar Labs, integrating SuperNova light sources into rack-scale AI systems. Ayar Labs joins a wave of AI-infrastructure capital raises — echoes of PsiQuantum’s $100M CHIPS Act award and Anthropic’s $517B compute build-out — but with a hardware chokepoint the whole industry has to fix.
Reporting based on coverage from SiliconANGLE and Reuters.