Celestial AI recently announced it has raised $100 million in Series B funding led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. Other major investors in the funding round include Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobil Holding SE, The Engine Fund, imec.xpand, M Ventures, and Tyche Partners. Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric technology platform delivers optical connectivity performance levels that are ten years more advanced than existing technology offerings.
The era of electrical connectivity limiting data transmission is now ending as optical interconnectivity is becoming the foundational building block for accelerated computing. And today’s advanced AI models require exponentially increasing memory capacity and bandwidth as Large Language Models (LLM) including GPT-4 used for ChatGPT and Recommendation Engines are memory bound rather than compute-bound.
Cloud service providers (CSPs) and hyperscale data centers are not able to decouple memory scaling from computing, often referred to as the “memory-wall” challenge. Low bandwidth, high latency, and high-power electrical interconnects are consequential barriers to the growth of profitable AI business models and advancements in AI.
As a result, Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) is now the only viable solution to enable the disaggregation of scalable data center memory and accelerated computing. And optically interconnected pooled memory systems address the largest contributor to data center economic inefficiency – stranded memory.
After close collaboration with hyperscalers, AI computes and memory providers, the company is introducing the Photonic Fabric, the optical interconnect for disaggregated, exascale compute and memory clusters. And Photonic Fabric is unconstrained by package beachfront limitations and can deliver data to any location on the compute die, directly to the point of consumption. The bandwidth has delivered by the Photonic Fabric is 25x greater and delivers more than 10X lower latency and power consumption than any optical interconnect alternative, such as Co-Packaged Optics (CPO).
Celestial AI is now building a robust Photonic Fabric ecosystem consisting of AI compute, memory suppliers, hyperscalers, and high-volume commercial supply chain partners. And the technology is compatible with existing industry standards including CXL, PCIe, UCIe, JEDEC HBM, and proprietary electrical communication links. Plus Celestial AI is offering its Photonic Fabric optical interconnect technology and silicon-proven IP through a technology licensing program.
The company offers a suite of Photonic Fabric technology solutions to provide independent scalability of compute and memory resources. And customers can utilize the Photonic Fabric as an extension to their existing compute platforms (GPUs, CPUs, and accelerators) through licensable IP or can harness the full end-to-end benefits of the Photonic Fabric with Celestial AI’s Orion AI accelerator. The Photonic Fabric also enables industry-first production deployments of optically interconnected high-capacity, high bandwidth composable memory systems.
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric offers the foundational technology to disaggregate optically scalable, data center composable memory and compute resources, to unleash advancements in AI with sustainable and profitable business models.
KEY QUOTE:
“We are at the beginning of an unprecedented journey toward the next generation of intelligence which will transform our way of life. Generative AI and Recommendation Engines, which today are running on general purpose computing systems, have already begun to measurably impact business processes, products and services. A rapid transition will take place in the coming years as global data center infrastructure transitions from general purpose to accelerated computing systems. This next wave of data center infrastructure is being architected to deliver tremendous advancements in AI workload efficiencies, resulting from disaggregation of memory and compute resources which is enabled by optical interconnectivity. Our technology solutions are lighting the way to the future of accelerated computing.”
— Dave Lazovsky, Celestial AI founder and CEO
