Celestial AI, a start-up developing an optical interconnect for disaggregated, exascale compute and memory clusters, raised $100 million in Series B funding.
Celestial AI is working on Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) to enable disaggregation of scalable data center memory and accelerated computing. The company says its Photonic Fabric is unconstrained by package beachfront limitations and can deliver data to any location on the compute die, directly to the point of consumption. It promises greater scalability and more than 10X lower latency and power consumption compared with any optical interconnect alternative, such as Co-Packaged Optics (CPO).
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric ecosystem will consist of AI compute, memory suppliers, hyperscalers and high-volume commercial supply chain partners. The technology is compatible with existing industry standards including CXL, PCIe, UCIe, JEDEC HBM, and proprietary electrical communication links.
The new funding was led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. Other major investors in the round include Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobil Holding SE, The Engine Fund, imec.xpand, M Ventures and Tyche Partners.
“We are at the beginning of an unprecedented journey toward the next generation of intelligence which will transform our way of life,” said Dave Lazovsky, Celestial AI founder and CEO. “Generative AI and Recommendation Engines, which today are running on general purpose computing systems, have already begun to measurably impact business processes, products and services. A rapid transition will take place in the coming years as global data center infrastructure transitions from general purpose to accelerated computing systems. This next wave of data center infrastructure is being architected to deliver tremendous advancements in AI workload efficiencies, resulting from disaggregation of memory and compute resources which is enabled by optical interconnectivity. Our technology solutions are lighting the way to the future of accelerated computing.”
