Oriole Networks, a British company with plans for a completely new networking infrastructure for AI supercomputing clusters that is based on using light instead of electricity to transmit data, has raised $22 million from the London-based venture capital firm Plural.
Photonics, which is the science of generating, manipulating, and detecting light, is suddenly a hot topic in the tech industry as a potential solution to two big problems facing AI data centers: their colossal electricity demands and the time it can take train the largest AI models on massive datasets. Just this week, two other companies working on photonic networking for AI chips announced major funding rounds.
Lightmatter, announced it had raised $400 million in a venture capital deal led by T. Rowe Price that values the seven-year-old company at $4.4 billion. And Xscape Photonics announced it had closed a $44 million investment round led by IAG Capital, with the venture capital arm of network equipment maker Cisco and Nvidia among its other investors.
