Wafer‑Scale Switch Promises a Photonic Fast Lane for AI

Startup nEye Systems has secured US$58 million in Series B financing round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, with support from Microsoft’s M12, Micron Ventures, Nvidia and Socratic Partners. The fresh capital will fund commercialization of an optical switch specially designed for bandwidth‑hungry artificial‑intelligence data centers. The investment brings nEye’s total to US$72.5 million, and it means that the firm will ship samples of its first chip in 2026. 

Unlike conventional switches that send information in the form of electrical signals, nEye’s device is a wafer‑scale optical circuit switch that moves data as light, eliminating the need for repeated electrical‑optical conversions. Ming Wu–company cofounder and professor at University of California, Berkeley, USA–says the approach delivers virtually “unlimited” bandwidth while slashing power consumption—tackling the bottlenecks that are starting to slow AI training and inference. Because every connection is optical, the architecture can re‑route traffic on the fly, providing cloud operators with a way to optimize network topologies for the workload of the moment. 

The drive toward optical fabrics is gathering momentum as hyperscale operators confront increasingly large energy bills. While most solutions still hinge on point‑to‑point optical links, nEye is betting that a central switch capable of dynamically remapping thousands of fiberswill yield bigger efficiency gains—reducing both the number of transceivers and the distance signals travel. 

Wu—who also co‑directs Berkeley’s Sensor and Actuator Center—traces the switch back to years of university research into micro‑electro‑mechanical mirrors. “Our wafer‑scale approach positions us to transform the AI fabric,” he said after the funding announcement, referring to the design as ground‑breaking for its potential to remove communication bottlenecks that force today’s accelerators to sit idle while waiting for data. 

With prototypes already in labs, nEye expects to have a production‑ready part next year and is in discussions with multiple hyperscalers to schedule pilot deployments. If early promises hold, the start‑up could give data‑center operators higher throughput, lower latency and reduced power draw—all delivered by a single optical slab no thicker than a coin.