Ayar Labs has pulled in another $150M, stretching its Series E round to $650M as investors bet that light will replace copper inside AI racks.
The startup, founded in 2015, has now raised just over $1B. Its March Series E, led by Neuberger Berman, brought in $500M and drew Nvidia, AMD and MediaTek as participants. The extension came from an investor the company did not name.
At the center of the pitch is TeraPHY, an optical engine Ayar packages beside a GPU or accelerator so signals leave the socket as light rather than electrical pulses. The company argues copper has run into three walls at once: signals fade over distance, drive power balloons, and cables overheat once clusters pass a few thousand chips.
Chief executive Mark Wade has described qualification speed, not physics, as the binding constraint. Customers planning product ramps in the 2028 to 2029 window need Ayar’s parts production-ready by the end of 2027, he has said, and the fresh capital widens engineering capacity for those programs.
An earlier tranche already paid for a chip design center in Bengaluru, India. Taiwanese data center builder Wiwynn, which invested this year, is working with Ayar on rack-scale systems that pair its optics with the SuperNova remote light source. Wiwynn chief executive William Lin said the two are targeting designs that ease the power and complexity limits copper imposes on hyperscale halls.
