Lightmatter’s optical interconnect and computing technology draws $400M

Following a 400-million-dollar investment round, US startup Lightmatter has reached a valuation of 4.4 billion dollars on the promise of light-based inter-chip communication and computation. The firm’s Passage technology takes advantage of light’s latency and bandwidth advantages over electrons to exchange data, allowing the creation of ‘superprocessors’ by linking regular processors together at light speed. Passage can also be deployed to perform matrix multiplications much more energy-efficiently than electron-based products ever could. This feature in particular is drawing investors’ attention, as these types of calculations are heavily featured in AI models, the training of which is taking unsustainable amounts of energy. Lightmatter has raised 850 billion dollars so far.