Volantis Secures $88 Million to Tackle AI Chip Bottleneck with Laser Technology

Semiconductor startup Volantis announced Thursday it has raised $88 million in a venture capital round to develop a new technology that uses laser light to solve a critical data bottleneck for artificial intelligence chips, according to a Reuters report.

Funding to Address a Core AI Challenge

The funding round was led by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures. Reuters reported that other participants included prominent early-stage investor John Doerr, an early backer of Google and Amazon, as well as VXI Capital, Triatomic, and Susa Ventures. Angel investors included AI chip veteran Naveen Rao and Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas.

Volantis is tackling one of the fundamental limits in AI hardware: the speed and capacity of the connection between a processing chip and the memory chips that store and feed it data. Market leaders like Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) currently use advanced packaging with tiny electrical wires to link their GPUs to high-bandwidth memory.

A New Approach Using Light

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This electrical method has physical limitations on reach, restricting even Nvidia's top-tier GPUs to just eight surrounding memory chips. Volantis says its technology, which sends data via laser beams, eliminates this distance problem. The company claims its approach could allow for 220 memory chips to be packed around a single GPU, a massive potential increase in memory access for AI models.

To achieve this, Volantis is using vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). This technology is already a proven, mass-produced component, most notably used to power the facial recognition features in Apple iPhones. By using relatively well-known components, the company hopes to avoid novel supply chain bottlenecks.

"No one is going to win a Nobel Prize if our project works, but the good news is, they won’t need to," CEO and co-founder Tapa Ghosh told Reuters, emphasizing the strategy of building on existing, reliable technology. Volantis aims to deliver its first chip next year.