Ayar Labs has secured an additional $150 million as it accelerates development, validation and manufacturing of optical interconnect technology designed for next-generation artificial intelligence systems.
The financing, announced on September 10, 2026, extends the company’s $500 million Series E round announced in March. The latest investment brings Ayar Labs’ primary capital raised during 2026 to $650 million.
The company has now raised approximately $1.02 billion in disclosed primary funding since its founding, based on the $870 million total reported following the Series E and the additional $150 million financing.
Ayar Labs said the new funding will support product development, product validation, manufacturing ecosystem readiness, high-volume production and engineering expansion. The company is also establishing a new design center in Bengaluru, India.
The latest financing comes as the company prepares for potential customer deployments of its optical technology. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Mark Wade said customers could be targeting product ramps around 2028 and 2029, with Ayar Labs aiming to complete qualification for volume production by the end of 2027.
A separate $225 million secondary share transaction was also reported alongside the financing. Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners led the purchase of shares from early Ayar Labs employees and investors, with participation from Sequoia Global Equities, ARK Invest and Greycroft.
That transaction valued Ayar Labs at more than $5 billion. It is separate from the $150 million in new capital going into the company and should not be treated as part of the amount raised by Ayar Labs in the latest financing.
The company’s technology is aimed at reducing some of the limitations associated with moving large amounts of data between processors, accelerators and other components in AI systems.
Ayar Labs develops optical input/output technology that uses light to move data rather than relying entirely on electrical connections. Its approach places optical connectivity much closer to computing components through a technology known as co-packaged optics.
Its product portfolio includes the TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet and SuperNova multi-wavelength light source. According to the company’s TeraPHY technical documentation, a TeraPHY implementation can provide up to 8 Tbps of bidirectional bandwidth, although specifications vary by product configuration.
Ayar Labs also advertises higher bandwidth, lower latency and improved power efficiency compared with conventional approaches. The company says its technology can provide up to 10 times higher bandwidth, up to 10 times lower latency and three to five times greater power efficiency in certain comparisons.
The company says its optical I/O architecture can support connections ranging from short distances to as much as two kilometers in certain configurations.
The technology is based on silicon photonics and CMOS manufacturing processes. Ayar Labs says TeraPHY uses an optical interface alongside an electrical interface and is designed to support high-bandwidth connections required by large computing systems.
The push has attracted investment from several major semiconductor companies. Ayar Labs’ strategic backers include NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and MediaTek, alongside financial investors.
In December 2024, Ayar Labs raised $155 million in a Series D funding round led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital. NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, 3M Ventures and Autopilot also participated.
The Series D brought the company’s cumulative funding to $370 million and pushed its valuation above $1 billion, according to Ayar Labs.
In March 2026, Ayar Labs raised another $500 million in a Series E led by Neuberger Berman. ARK Invest, Insight Partners, Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia Global Equities and 1789 Capital participated, along with strategic investments from AMD, Alchip, MediaTek and NVIDIA.
The Series E brought total funding to $870 million and valued the company at $3.75 billion, according to the company’s Series E announcement.
Ayar Labs has also expanded its work beyond individual optical components into larger AI infrastructure systems.
In March, the company announced a partnership with Wiwynn to develop rack-scale AI systems using its optical technology. The companies demonstrated an architecture incorporating TeraPHY optical engines, SuperNova light sources, liquid cooling, fiber management and high-voltage direct-current power infrastructure.
Wiwynn provides data-center hardware and system integration capabilities and says it has shipped servers to more than 750 data centers worldwide. The company operates manufacturing facilities in Taiwan, the United States, Mexico, Malaysia and the Czech Republic.
Ayar Labs has also entered NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem. The company announced in June that its technology would be compatible with NVIDIA’s optical and SerDes technologies, allowing system developers to build optically connected infrastructure around NVLink Fusion.
The relationship gives Ayar Labs a potential path into future AI systems using NVIDIA’s broader connectivity ecosystem.
Ayar Labs’ roots trace back to research conducted at MIT, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Colorado. The company was founded in 2015 by a team that included Mark Wade, Vladimir Stojanovic, Chen Sun, Milos Popovic and Rajeev Ram, with Alex Wright-Gladstein also associated with its founding.
The company’s leadership currently includes Wade as CEO and co-founder, Stojanovic as CTO and co-founder, and Sun as chief scientist, vice president and co-founder. Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is among the company’s board members.
Ayar Labs has been developing optical I/O for about a decade and has shipped multiple generations of its TeraPHY optical engines. The company says it is now focused on moving the technology toward large-scale commercial production.
The manufacturing challenge remains a central part of that effort. Scaling optical technology requires progress across chip production, packaging, testing, optical performance, thermal management, reliability and supply-chain operations.
The latest funding is therefore directed heavily toward validation and manufacturing readiness rather than only basic technology development.
Ayar Labs’ plans also reflect a broader push to connect increasingly large numbers of processors and accelerators across AI infrastructure. The company says its architecture is designed to connect thousands of GPUs across racks through a unified optical fabric.
The company’s product portfolio provides further details on its optical I/O and light-source technologies.
The Open Compute Project’s technical material on Ayar Labs also documents the company’s in-package optical I/O approach and its potential use in high-throughput computing systems.
With the latest $150 million financing, Ayar Labs is moving closer to its stated 2027 qualification target while positioning its optical connectivity technology for AI infrastructure deployments expected from 2028 onward.
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