Neurophos expects the funding to speed up manufacturing development of its chips, which could be used to accelerate AI.
Neurophos has landed another $110 million in funding from investors including Gates Frontier, Bill Gates’ venture capital outfit, to move its photonic chips nearer to production.
The growing use of AI has led to increasing demands on computational power within data centers. Traditional silicon-based processors are struggling to meet these demands, leading to limitations on performance at the same time as increased energy consumption.
The optical processing unit (OPU) developed by Neurophos integrates over one million micron-scale optical processing elements on a single chip. The company claims its proprietary technology offers a hundred-fold increase in performance over existing chips. It has managed to achieve this by developing micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators, enabling large-scale photonic computing. It said its micron-scale technology means photonic elements could now be made 10,000 times smaller.
“Moore’s Law is slowing, but AI can’t afford to wait. Our breakthrough in photonics unlocks an entirely new dimension of scaling, by packing massive optical parallelism on a single chip,” said Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos. “This physics-level shift means both efficiency and raw speed improve as we scale up, breaking free from the power walls that constrain traditional GPUs.”
The new funding includes investments from Microsoft’s investment fund M12 that will help speed up delivery of Neurophos’ first integrated photonic compute system, including datacenter-ready OPU modules.
Neurophos is not the only company exploring this field. Last April, Lightmatter announced the launch of photonic chips to tackle data center bottlenecks, And in 2024, IBM said its researchers were exploring optical chips and developing a prototype in this area.
