Ayar Labs Raises $500 Million to Scale Optical Chiplets for AI Data Centers

Overview

• A $500 million Series E led by Neuberger Berman values Ayar Labs at about $3.8 billion, with investors including NVIDIA, MediaTek, the Qatar Investment Authority, Alchip, ARK Invest, Insight Partners, Sequoia, and 1789 Capital.
• Proceeds will accelerate high-volume manufacturing and testing of the TeraPHY optical I/O chiplets and support global expansion, including a new office in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
• The raise comes alongside NVIDIA’s separate $4 billion commitment to Coherent and Lumentum to expand photonics manufacturing capacity.
• Ayar highlights copper’s limits above roughly 800 Gbps—short reach and reliance on power-hungry retimers—as a key bottleneck its co-packaged optics aim to overcome.
• The company cites validated prototypes with Intel and DARPA and reference designs with GUC and Alchip, and it claims configurations exceeding 200 Tbps per package with 4–20× better throughput per watt than copper.