Ayar Labs Secures Additional $150M, Lifting 2026 Capital to $650M

Ayar Labs announced on September 10, 2026, that it has secured an additional $150 million in funding, bringing the co-packaged optics (CPO) company’s total primary capital raised in 2026 to $650 million.

The company said the new capital will support its continued transition to high-volume manufacturing, including investments in product development, validation, and scaling the manufacturing ecosystem, as well as the opening of a new design center in Bengaluru, India. Chief executive and co-founder Mark Wade pointed to the interconnect constraints facing AI infrastructure. “Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up,” Wade said. “This funding allows us to move faster on manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics at scale. We’re deepening our work across the foundry and packaging ecosystem and growing our engineering capacity to support customer programs worldwide.”

Ayar Labs describes its CPO technology as a way to bring high-bandwidth, energy-efficient connectivity closer to compute as AI systems scale from single accelerators to multi-rack architectures, where performance is increasingly restricted by the power and physical constraints of electrical I/O. The company describes its offering as the industry’s first proven CPO solution manufactured in partnership with the semiconductor ecosystem.

Wiwynn Investment and Rack-Scale Partnership

In the same announcement, Ayar Labs disclosed that Wiwynn, a cloud IT and infrastructure provider for data centers, made a strategic investment earlier in 2026. The company said Wiwynn joins a group of strategic backers that includes Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and NVIDIA.

“Co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centers,” said William Lin, Wiwynn’s president and chief executive. Lin said that through Wiwynn’s collaboration and investment with Ayar Labs, he sees a clear path to new architectures that reduce the power and complexity limits of copper interconnects and support rack-scale deployment for the next wave of hyperscale AI data centers.

The disclosure follows a strategic partnership the two companies announced on March 11, 2026, to deliver optically connected, rack-scale AI systems for next-generation hyperscale AI workloads. According to the partnership announcement, the joint solution integrates Ayar Labs’ TeraPHY optical engines, powered by the SuperNova remote light source, into Wiwynn’s rack-level architecture for next-generation data centers. The companies said the collaboration addresses the practical deployment challenges hyperscalers face, including optical fiber management, integration of CPO-enabled AI ASICs, thermal management, power efficiency, and manufacturability.

The rack-scale infrastructure is designed to scale to 1,024 AI accelerators and beyond, with each accelerator capable of delivering more than 100 Tbps of optical connectivity, the companies said, incorporating a liquid-cooled architecture optimized for high-power operation with support for external laser small form factor pluggable (ELSFP) light sources. The partnership announcement states that Wiwynn has shipped general and AI servers to more than 750 data centers worldwide, supported by manufacturing operations in Taiwan, the United States, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Czech Republic, with end-to-end capabilities spanning board design, system integration, and high-volume L10 and L11 rack delivery.

Series E Behind the 2026 Total

The new capital adds to Ayar Labs’ fundraising earlier in 2026. On March 3, 2026, the company announced the closing of $500 million in Series E funding led by Neuberger Berman. Ayar Labs said at the time that the round brought its total funding to $870 million and raised its valuation to $3.75 billion.

New investors in the Series E included Alchip Technologies, ARK Invest, Insight Partners, MediaTek, Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia Global Equities, and 1789 Capital. They joined existing financial investors Advent Global Opportunities, Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, Light Street Capital, and Playground Global, as well as existing strategic investors AMD Ventures and NVIDIA, according to the March announcement. Neuberger Berman was set to take a board observer role as part of the round.

Ayar Labs said the Series E funds would scale high-volume production and test capacity, expand global operations including its Hsinchu, Taiwan office, strengthen ecosystem partnerships, and accelerate deployment of its CPO solution. The March announcement describes the TeraPHY optical engine as the heart of that solution, built on the standard form factor, manufacturing, and packaging flows used by major accelerator and switch vendors for integration into existing customer designs. Gabe Cahill, a managing director at Neuberger Berman, said in the announcement that data center interconnect had quickly emerged as the most critical bottleneck in the AI infrastructure buildout and that Ayar Labs’ execution against key customer milestones was driving strong market conviction in its technology.

New Bengaluru Design Center

Alongside the funding, Ayar Labs is opening a Bengaluru Design Center that will complement its existing engineering teams in the United States and Hsinchu, Taiwan. Sankara Venkateswaran, the company’s vice president of silicon engineering, who was hired earlier in 2026, is overseeing the new office, with Arun Balachandar, senior director of engineering, serving as site lead. The company said the India team will build end-to-end engineering capabilities across silicon product development.

Venkateswaran said the Bengaluru center supports the company’s transition from technology development to commercialization and production. As customer demand and the complexity of the product roadmap increase, he said, expanding global engineering capacity will help Ayar Labs execute faster, support multiple development programs, and collaborate more closely with partners and customers across the region.

Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs is funded by domestic and international venture capital firms as well as strategic investors including AMD, Applied Ventures, MediaTek, NVIDIA, and VentureTech Alliance, according to the company. Ayar Labs said it is hiring for open roles in San Jose, Hsinchu, and Bengaluru to meet demand for its co-packaged optics.