Salience Labs Raises $125M to Scale All-Optical Circuit Switching for AI Data Centers

Series B Backed by Chip Giants

Salience Labs Inc. said it has raised $125 million in a Series B funding round led by Bullhound Capital. Intel Capital and AMD Ventures, the investment arms of two of the chipmaking industry's most iconic companies, also participated in the round. SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank were named as new investors, while existing backers including Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures returned to take part again.

Optical Switching for AI Clusters

The startup develops specialized all-optical circuit switching technology for AI data centers, and it has attracted significant interest due to the unprecedented strain being placed on existing infrastructure. Co-founder and CEO Vaysh Kewada said most data centers still rely on traditional networking fabrics based on electronic switches and repeated optical-to-electrical-to-optical signal conversions, which cannot keep up with the massive throughput demands of AI computing clusters made up of tens of thousands of GPUs and other accelerators. The available interconnect bandwidth is seriously lagging behind raw compute capacity, creating latency bottlenecks and growing power consumption that drives up the cost of AI workloads.

Salience Labs' answer is an all-optical, fully integrated silicon photonics-based network switch architecture targeted at high-density workloads. Instead of feeding massive data packets into GPUs electrically, it dynamically routes information directly on-chip, which the company says delivers much lower latency and significantly reduced power consumption while enabling GPU clusters to scale to hundreds of thousands of chips. "Optical circuit switching will play a critical role in AI data center networking," Kewada said, adding that high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that AI workloads demand.

64-Port Switch Showcased, Funding Plans

At the ECOC 2026 conference in September, Salience Labs demonstrated what it called the world's first 64-port all-optical photonic switch. The company said the device validates its approach and lays the groundwork for denser 128-port and 256-port configurations now under development to support scale-up and scale-out network fabrics across data-intensive environments. Cignal AI forecasts the optical circuit switching market will grow to more than $8 billion by the end of the decade.

The new funding will be directed toward volume manufacturing, geographic market expansion and the research and development of higher-density switches. Intel Capital's Srini Ananth said most data center operators already recognize that photonic switches are the future and will soon become omnipresent in all modern AI factories, praising Salience Labs' integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification for addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale.

Sources: SiliconANGLE · Salience Labs