Celestial AI raises $250m to operate at the speed of light

Santa Clara — Celestial AI, one of several Silicon Valley chip start-ups aiming to crack a key speed constraint in AI, said on Tuesday it has raised an additional $250m in venture capital, bringing its total raised to date to $515m.

Celestial AI is tapping photonics — a technology that uses light, rather than electrical signals — to create speedy links between AI computing chips and memory chips.

The speed of that connection, a measure called memory bandwidth, has become so central to advancing AI systems that it is one of the factors that determine whether a chip is subject to US government export controls such as those designed to limit China’s AI advances.

Nvidia reigns supreme in memory bandwidth with proprietary technologies called NVLink and NVSwitch. That has set off a technology race among start-ups and a flurry of funding to find alternatives that can be used by other chip firms. Celestial AI rivals Lightmatter and Ayar Labs have raised $850m and $370m, respectively.

Celestial AI, which is backed by the venture arm of Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is developing a technology that can sit like a bridge between two or more chips and uses a different kind of photonics technology than its rivals.

The goal of this “photonic fabric”, said Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky, is to provide speed while saving space and power, the two things that are at a premium in every chip’s design.

“There are no good answers right outside Nvidia,” Lazovsky said in an interview at the firm’s Santa Clara, California headquarters. “What we had created with the photonic fabric does the same thing, but at a different level of energy efficiency and of latency.”

Celestial AI said the new round of funding was led by Fidelity Management & Research and joined by BlackRock, Maverick Capital, Tiger Global Management and Lip-Bu Tan, the former CEO of chip design software firm Cadence Design Systems.

Also joining were existing investors AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Singapore state investor Temasek, Temasek’s wholly owned subsidiary Xora Innovation, Porsche Automobil Holding and The Engine Ventures.

Reuters