Mark Wade

New Capabilities

Leading Ayar Labs through production scale-up

Every time engineers double the data rate on a copper wire, electrical noise doubles too, cutting the usable cable length in half. That physics problem is now strangling the AI industry. As graphics processing units (GPUs) push toward 224 gigabits per second per lane, passive copper cables inside data centers can reach less than one meter before the signal degrades. Ayar Labs, a startup born from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley, just closed $500 million in Series E funding at a $3.75 billion valuation to mass-produce chips that replace those copper links with light.

Updated Mar 3