Ayar Labs Secures Additional $150M, Lifting 2026 Capital to $650M

Ayar Labs announced on September 10, 2026 that it has secured an additional $150 million in funding, bringing the co‑packaged optics (CPO) company’s total primary capital raised in 2026 to $650 million. The new capital will support Ayar Labs’ transition to high‑volume manufacturing, investments in product development and validation, scaling of the manufacturing ecosystem, and the opening of a new design center in Bengaluru, India.

“Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale‑up,” said Mark Wade, chief executive 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.”

Context and recent strategic moves

The $150 million announced in September adds to a March 3, 2026 Series E close in which Ayar Labs raised $500 million led by Neuberger Berman. That March financing lifted Ayar Labs’ total funding to $870 million and its valuation to $3.75 billion. New investors in that Series E included Alchip Technologies, ARK Invest, Insight Partners, MediaTek, Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia Global Equities, and 1789 Capital. They joined existing financial investors Advent Global Opportunities, Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, Light Street Capital, and Playground Global, as well as strategic investors AMD Ventures and NVIDIA. Neuberger Berman took a board observer role as part of the round.

The company describes its TeraPHY optical engine, powered by the SuperNova remote light source, as the heart of its CPO solution and says it is the industry’s first proven CPO offering manufactured in partnership with the semiconductor ecosystem. Ayar Labs positions CPO as a way to bring high‑bandwidth, energy‑efficient connectivity closer to compute as AI deployments scale from single accelerators to multi‑rack architectures where electrical I/O becomes constrained by power and physical limits.

• Wiwynn, a cloud IT and infrastructure provider, made a strategic investment earlier in 2026 and joined strategic backers that include Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and NVIDIA.
• The Ayar Labs–Wiwynn partnership, announced March 11, 2026, integrates TeraPHY and the SuperNova remote light source into Wiwynn’s rack‑level architecture to support rack‑scale AI systems.
• The joint rack design is engineered to scale to 1,024 accelerators and beyond, with each accelerator capable of more than 100 Tbps of optical connectivity and a liquid‑cooled architecture supporting external laser small form factor pluggable (ELSFP) light sources.

Outlook

Sankara Venkateswaran, vice president of silicon engineering and leader of the new Bengaluru Design Center, said the India office will “build end‑to‑end engineering capabilities across silicon product development” and support Ayar Labs’ shift from technology development to commercialization and production. Arun Balachandar will serve as site lead for the Bengaluru team. The company said it is hiring for roles in San Jose, Hsinchu, and Bengaluru to meet demand for its CPO technology.

Gabe Cahill, a managing director at Neuberger Berman, framed Ayar Labs’ mission in market terms earlier this year: data center interconnect “had quickly emerged as the most critical bottleneck in the AI infrastructure buildout” and Ayar Labs’ progress against customer milestones was driving market conviction. With the additional $150 million, Ayar Labs aims to accelerate manufacturing‑ready CPO deployment and expand global operations to meet the scaling demands of hyperscale AI customers.