By Stephen Nellis
Santa Clara, California (Reuters) – Celestial AI, one of the many Silicon Valley Chip startups who want to crack an important speed limit in artificial intelligence, said on Tuesday that it has collected another $ 250 million in risk capital, which has so far been increased to $ 515 million.
Celestial AI ticks photonics – a technology that uses light, instead of electrical signals – to make fast links between AI Computing chips and memory chips.
The speed of that connection, a measure called memory band width, has become so central to promoting AI systems that it is one of the factors that determine whether a chip is subject to export controls of the US government, as designed to limit the AI preface to China.
Nvidia Supreme is currently in memory bandwidth with its own technologies called NVLink and NVSWitch. This has set up a technological race under startups and a flurry of financing to find alternatives that can be used by other chip companies. Celestial AI Rivals Lightmatter and Ayar Labs have collected $ 850 million and $ 370 million respectively.
Celestial AI, which is supported by the Venture arm of Nvidia Rival Advanced Micro devices, develops a technology that can sit as a bridge between two or more chips and a different kind of photonic technology uses than its rivals.
The purpose of this “photonic fabric”, Celestial Ai CEO Dave Lazovsky told Reuters, is to offer speed while saving space and strength, the two things that are in the design of each chip premium.
“There are no good answers just outside of Nvidia,” Lazovsky said in an interview at Santa Clara’s head office, California in the company. “What we had made with the photonic fabric does the same, but on a different level of energy efficiency and of latency.”
Celestial AI said that the new financing round was led by Fidelity Management & Research and accompanied by BlackRock, Maverick Capital, Tiger Global Management and LIP-BU TAN, the former CEO of Chip design company Cadence Design Systems. There are also existing investors AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Singapore State Investor Temasek, Temasek’s full subsidiary Xora Innovation, Porsche Automobil Holding and the Engine Ventures.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, California; Edit by Jamie Freed)
