Celestial AI, a developer of optical interconnect technology, has recently raised $100 million in a successful series B funding round for its Photonic Fabric technology platform. The investment was led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. Other notable participants included Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, and several others.
According to Celestial AI, their Photonic Fabric platform represents a significant advancement in optical connectivity performance, surpassing existing technologies. The company has now raised a total of $165 million from seed funding through series B.
The demand for advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as GPT-4, has been on the rise. However, the increasing memory capacity and bandwidth required by these models present challenges for cloud service providers (CSPs) and hyperscale data centers. This is commonly referred to as the memory-wall challenge.
The limitations of electrical interconnect, such as restricted bandwidth, high latency, and high power consumption, hinder the growth and advancements of AI business models.
To address these challenges, Celestial AI has collaborated with hyper scalers, AI computing, and memory providers to develop the Photonic Fabric platform. The optical interconnect is specifically designed for disaggregated, exascale computing, and memory clusters.
Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky explains that the key problem going forward is memory capacity, bandwidth, and data movement for large language models and recommendation engine workloads. The Photonic Fabric technology allows the integration of photonics directly into the silicon die, delivering data at any point on the die to the point of computing. Lazovsky emphasizes that competitive solutions cannot achieve this level of integration.
The company claims that Photonic Fabric addresses the challenge of limited bandwidth and high latency by providing significantly increased bandwidth (1.8 Tbps/mm²) with nanosecond latencies. This allows for fully photonic compute-to-compute and compute-to-memory links.
The recent funding round has also attracted the attention of Broadcom, who is collaborating with Celestial AI on the development of Photonic Fabric prototypes based on the company’s designs. These prototypes are expected to be ready for shipment to customers within the next 18 months.
The low latency data transmission offered by Photonic Fabric facilitates the connection and disaggregation of a higher number of servers compared to traditional electrical interconnects. It also enables latency-sensitive applications to utilize remote memory, which was previously unattainable.
By increasing the addressable memory capacity of each processor at high bandwidth, Photonic Fabric allows for reduced reliance on expensive processors, thereby reducing costs and enhancing infrastructure efficiency.
Celestial AI aims to simplify enterprise computation for large language models and deep learning recommendation models by providing high bandwidth and low latency chip-to-chip and chip-to-memory interconnect solutions.
The funds raised in this round will be used to accelerate the productization and commercialization of the Photonic Fabric technology platform by expanding Celestial AI’s engineering, sales, and technical marketing teams.
By overcoming the limitations of memory capacity and bandwidth, Celestial AI believes their technology will contribute to the progress and adoption of AI models, enabling businesses and applications to adopt large models faster.
