Celestial AI raises $100 million in Series B funding

Celestial AI, based in Santa Clara, California, USA, is the creator of photonic structures. The company received $100 million in Series B funding, led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), and Temasek's Xora Innovation Fund. Other major investors in this round of financing include Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobile Holding SE, the Engine Fund, and imec. Expansion, M Ventures, and Tyche Partners. The optical connectivity performance level provided by Celestial AI's photonic structure technology platform is reportedly ten years ahead of existing technology products. Celestial AI states that the era of electronic connections limiting data transmission is coming to an end, as optical interconnects become the fundamental building blocks for accelerating computing. Today's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models require exponential growth in memory capacity and bandwidth, as large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4 used for ChatGPT and recommendation engines, are memory constraints rather than computational constraints. Cloud service providers (CSPs) and hyperscale data centers are unable to separate memory expansion from computing (often referred to as the "memory wall" challenge). Low bandwidth, high latency, and high-power electrical interconnection are important obstacles to the growth of profitable business models and progress in artificial intelligence. Therefore, Optical Computing Interconnection (OCI) is considered the only feasible solution for implementing scalable data center memory decomposition and accelerating computation. In addition, the pool storage system of optical interconnection solves the biggest factor causing low economic efficiency in data centers - stranded memory. After closely collaborating with hyperscale, artificial intelligence computing, and memory providers, Celestial AI has launched Photonic Fabric, an optical interconnect for decomposition, billions of computations, and memory clusters. It is said that the photonic structure is not constrained by the packaging seaside restrictions and can transmit data to any location on the computing chip, directly to the consumption point. The bandwidth provided by photonic structures is 25 times higher than any alternative optical interconnect solution, such as co packaged optical devices (CPO), with latency and power consumption reduced by more than 10 times. Dave Lazovsky, founder and CEO of Celestial AI, stated, "Generative artificial intelligence and recommendation engines running on general-purpose computing systems are starting to have a significant impact on business processes, products, and services." "With the global data center infrastructure shifting from general-purpose to accelerated computing systems, there will be a rapid transformation in the coming years. The architecture of the next wave of data center infrastructure aims to achieve the decomposition of memory and computing resources through optical interconnects, making significant progress in AI workload efficiency Celestial AI is building a powerful photonic structure ecosystem consisting of AI computing, memory suppliers, hyperscale suppliers, and a large number of commercial supply chain partners. This technology is compatible with existing industry standards, including CXL, PCIe, UCIe, JEDEC HBM, and proprietary electrical communication links. Celestial AI offers its photonic structure optical interconnect technology and silicon validated IP through a technology licensing program. Celestial AI has developed a transformative optical connectivity capability that will achieve a leap forward in performance and energy efficiency in high-performance computing, unleashing the potential of native AI and other complex workloads, "commented Chase Koch, founder and CEO of Koch Disruptive Technologies. He believes that "this may be a truly disruptive moment for advanced computing Celestial AI provides a set of photonic structure technology solutions to provide independent computing and memory resource scalability. Customers can extend their existing computing platforms (GPUs, CPUs, and accelerators) with photonic structures through authorized IPs, or utilize the full end-to-end advantages of photonic structures through Celestial AI's Orion AI Accelerator. The photonic structure also supports the production deployment of the industry's first optical interconnect high-capacity, high bandwidth combinable storage system. News: Optoelectronics