Celestial AI, a Silicon Valley chip startup working to overcome a major speed bottleneck in artificial intelligence, announced on Tuesday that it has secured an additional $250 million in venture capital, raising its total funding to $515 million.
In order to establish quick connections between AI computing chips and memory chips, Celestial AI is utilising photonics, a technique that employs light instead of electrical signals.
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 U.S. government export controls such as those designed to limit China’s AI advances.
At present, Nvidia reigns supreme in memory bandwidth with proprietary technologies called NVLink and NVSwitch. That has set off a technology race among startups 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 $850 million and $370 million, respectively.
Celestial AI, which is backed by the venture arm of Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices, 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,” Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky told Reuters, 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 of 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.”
According to Celestial AI, Fidelity Management & Research spearheaded the latest fundraising round, with BlackRock, Maverick Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Lip-Bu Tan—the former CEO of chip design software company Cadence Design Systems—joining them. Existing investors Porsche Automobil Holding, The Engine Ventures, Temasek, a state investor in Singapore, Koch Disruptive Technologies, AMD Ventures, and Temasek’s fully-owned subsidiary Xora Innovation also joined.
