Ayar Labs adds $150M for AI optical links

Ayar Labs secured an additional $150 million, bringing its primary capital raised in 2026 to $650 million, to push co-packaged optics toward high-volume manufacturing and open a Bengaluru design center, per its funding announcement. The company says copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor as AI systems scale across racks, but the announcement describes manufacturing readiness—not delivered production volume. HBM supply already sets a hard constraint on AI infrastructure; platform teams should file optical I/O as an architecture option, not assume it removes the rest of rack bottlenecks.