Lightmatter is a company that has reinvented how chips communicate and calculate. And its photonic interconnect and compute products simultaneously reduce the power consumption and increase the performance of silicon running the most advanced AI and HPC workloads. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris to learn more about the industry.
Changes To The Photonics Industry
What do you believe will happen in the photonics industry this year? Harris said:
“We’re going to see all of the major semiconductor companies working on their photonics plans. It’s become clear to the industry that silicon photonics is the path toward enabling the growth of large language models via supercomputing platforms.”
AI Accelerators
Generative AI has been driving a lot of demand for Lightmatter’s technology. Does Harris expect even more acceleration in 2024? Harris replied:
“There will be a huge number of AI accelerators shipped in 2024. The world is figuring out how to monetize this technology. The hyperscale operators (e.g. Google, Amazon, Microsoft) are building up their AI infrastructure for scale.”
Interesting Trends
Have you noticed any interesting trends, such as the demand for the Passage chip? Harris pointed out:
“The demand for Passage is growing rapidly as the largest semiconductor companies and hyperscalers are reaching AI’s power limits. As generative AI rapidly evolves, the demand for new compute and chip communication solutions is unprecedented. With Passage, Lightmatter is meeting this challenge, allowing AI models to increase in size and scale.”
Customer Wins
After asking Harris about customer wins, he pointed out:
“We have several pilots with our Passage Product out with customers now, and these customers include some of the biggest cloud providers, semiconductor companies, and enterprises, including multiple Tier1 semiconductor providers.”
Goals For This Year
What are your company goals for this year? Harris concluded:
“Lightmatter announced a $155 million Series C-2 for a total of $420+ million raised to date and is now valued at over $1.2 billion. We’re laser-focused on expediting growth to meet the increasing demand for high-performance computing and plan to use the additional funds raised from our series C-2 round to hire top-tier talent, including opening a new office in Toronto.”
