Optical links have spent years being described as the future of AI interconnect, and the money keeps arriving. Ayar Labs said on September 10 that it raised another $150M, taking its primary capital for 2026 to $650M.
Backers already include Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek and NVIDIA, and the announcement disclosed one more. Wiwynn, the data center infrastructure provider, made a strategic investment earlier in the year. Its president, William Lin, described a path to architectures that ease the power and complexity limits of copper cabling at hyperscale.
Chief executive Mark Wade made the technical case in plainer terms. Copper interconnect, he said, is becoming the factor that limits how far AI systems scale up, and the new money buys speed toward manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics. Spending goes to volume production, product development, validation, and a design center opening in Bengaluru, India.
Co-packaged optics places high-bandwidth, efficient links closer to the compute, which matters as systems grow from single accelerators into multi-rack installations where electrical input and output runs into power and physical ceilings. Ayar calls its offering the industry’s first proven co-packaged optics solution built with the semiconductor ecosystem.
The two companies announced a partnership in March, pairing Ayar’s TeraPHY optical engines and SuperNova light source with Wiwynn’s rack architecture.
