Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs is a San Jose-based semiconductor company building optical input/output (I/O) technology that moves data between chips using light instead of copper. Its silicon-photonics chiplets - the TeraPHY optical engine and the SuperNova multi-wavelength light source - are designed to be co-packaged directly with GPUs and other processors, letting AI and high-performance-computing systems scale across thousands of accelerators with far higher bandwidth and far lower power than electrical interconnects. Spun out of a DARPA-funded university research effort, the company raised a $500M Series E in 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and AMD.