Ayar Labs raises total funding to $650 million for co-packaged optics by 2026

Ayar Labs, a company specializing in co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions for AI infrastructure, has secured an additional $150 million in funding, bringing its total capital raised in 2026 to $650 million. Separately, the company disclosed that Wiwynn, a cloud IT and infrastructure provider for data centers, made a strategic investment earlier this year. Wiwynn joins a growing group of strategic backers that already includes Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and NVIDIA.

The new funding will support Ayar Labs' continued transition into high-volume manufacturing, including investments in product development, testing and validation, scaling up its manufacturing ecosystem, and opening a new design center in Bengaluru, India. The company continues working to build deep integration across the semiconductor manufacturing and engineering ecosystem, aiming to deliver what it describes as the highest-performing, manufacturing-ready CPO solution for scaling up AI systems.

Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs, said copper interconnects are becoming the limiting factor for scaling up AI infrastructure. He said this funding lets the company move faster on manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics at scale, deepening its work across the foundry and packaging ecosystem while growing its engineering capacity to support customer programs worldwide.

As AI systems scale up from single accelerator chips to systems spanning multiple server racks, performance increasingly becomes limited by the power and physical constraints of electrical input/output connections. Ayar Labs' CPO solutions, which integrate optical components directly alongside chip packaging, bring high-bandwidth, energy-efficient connectivity closer to the compute itself, letting system architects extend AI scale-up while reducing the power consumption and complexity that come with traditional copper interconnects.

William Lin, president and CEO of Wiwynn, said co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centers. He said through Wiwynn's collaboration and investment with Ayar Labs, the company sees a clear path toward new architectures that reduce the power and complexity limitations of copper interconnects, supporting rack-scale deployment for the next wave of hyperscale AI data centers.

As part of its growth strategy, Ayar Labs is expanding its global engineering presence with the new Bengaluru Design Center, which will complement its existing teams in the United States and Hsinchu, Taiwan. The company's vice president of silicon engineering, Sankara Venkateswaran, who was hired earlier this year, will oversee the new office, with Arun Balachandar, senior director of engineering, serving as site lead. The new India Design Center team will build end-to-end engineering capabilities spanning silicon product development.

Venkateswaran said the new Bengaluru Design Center supports the company's transition from technology development toward commercialization and production. He said that as customer demand and the complexity of the company's product roadmap continue to grow, expanding its global engineering capacity will help the company execute faster, support multiple development programs simultaneously, and collaborate more closely with partners and customers across the region.

Ayar Labs is actively hiring to meet growing demand for co-packaged optics, with open roles currently listed in San Jose, Hsinchu, and Bengaluru.