Hardware · Ai · Climate
Opticore
Opticore is a photonic computing startup building optical processing units (OPUs) - chips that run AI workloads with light and waveguides instead of electrons. Spun out of research at MIT, USC and UC Berkeley, the company claims its photonic chips are up to 100x more energy efficient and offer roughly 25x the computing density of leading GPUs, using time-multiplexed computing to encode as many as a trillion parameters on a single chip. Opticore has raised about $14.5M to date to attack the energy and 'memory wall' bottlenecks of AI data centers.