Ayar Labs expands 2026 funding to $650m
Photonics firm Ayar Labs has secured an additional $150m in funding, bringing its total primary capital raised in 2026 to $650m. Separately, the company disclosed that Wiwynn, a cloud IT and infrastructure provider for data centres, made an investment earlier this year.
Wiwynn joins a group of strategic backers that includes Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and NVIDIA.
This new capital will support Ayar Labs’ transition to high-volume manufacturing of Co Packaged Optics (CPO) product, including investments in product development, validation, scaling the manufacturing ecosystem, and opening a new Bengaluru Design centre in India.
"Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up," said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs. "This funding allows us to move faster on manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics at scale. We're deepening our work across the foundry and packaging ecosystem and growing our engineering capacity to support customer programs worldwide."
As AI systems scale from single accelerators to multi-rack architectures, performance is increasingly restricted by the power and physical constraints of electrical I/O. Ayar Labs CPO solutions bring high-bandwidth, energy-efficient connectivity closer to compute, enabling system architects to extend AI scale-up while reducing the power and complexity that comes with copper interconnects.
“Co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centres,” said William Lin, president and CEO of Wiwynn. “Through our collaboration and investment with Ayar Labs, we see a clear path to new architectures that reduce the power and complexity limits of copper interconnects, powering rack-scale deployment for the next wave of hyperscale AI data centres."
As part of its growth strategy, Ayar Labs is expanding its worldwide engineering presence with a new Bengaluru Design centre. This engineering hub will complement existing teams in the United States and Hsinchu, Taiwan. The company’s vice president of silicon engineering, Sankara Venkateswaran, hired earlier this year, is overseeing the new office, with Arun Balachandar, senior director of engineering, serving as site lead. The new India Design centre team will build end-to-end engineering capabilities across silicon product development.
“Our new Bengaluru Design centre supports our transition from technology development to commercialization and production,” said Venkateswaran. “As customer demand and the complexity of our product roadmap increase, expanding our global engineering capacity will help us execute faster, support multiple development programs, and collaborate more closely with partners and customers across the region.”
