Xscape Photonics Secures $44 Million to Transform AI Data Centers

As AI workloads continue to rise—projections estimate over 20% of large-scale data centers’ energy consumption will come from AI by 2025—the urgency to innovate has never been greater. Xscape Photonics is stepping in with an innovative solution. Founded in 2022 out of research that started in Columbia Engineering’s lab over a decade ago, the Santa Clara-based company, co-founded by three faculty members —Keren Bergman, Michal Lipson, and Alexander Gaeta, aims to address the performance bottleneck in AI training. 

Multi-color photonics: a game changer

The company recently secured $44 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of its novel multi-color photonics platform. The platform tackles the critical “escape bandwidth” problem, aiming to boost scalability, energy efficiency, and data performance in AI data centers. By using light to transmit terabytes of data, Xscape’s technology minimizes energy consumption while enhancing data flow. 

“With the explosion of AI applications, data centers are quickly becoming a major draw on our power grid,” says Keren Bergman, Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia, co-founder of Xscape Photonics, and a leading researcher in photonic interconnected computing systems. “Our interconnect technology will propel AI system performance while essentially bending the energy curve, enabling future scalability.”

Redefining AI infrastructure

AI workloads are placing unprecedented strain on data centers, with current technologies struggling to scale efficiently. At the heart of the problem lies the communication between GPUs and other chips within data centers, known as “interconnects.” These interconnects have limited bandwidth, which restricts AI performance. A 2022 survey revealed that AI developers typically use only 25% of a GPU's capacity. Xscape has developed the ChromX platform, a multi-wavelength photonics approach designed to overcome data communications limitations. Typical interconnects are restricted to transmitting data over four colors on a single fiber, but ChromX can handle hundreds of colors. This innovation reduces power consumption tenfold while delivering an increase in performance—a significant leap forward for AI infrastructure.

A research collaboration born at Columbia

The origins of Xscape Photonics trace back to a collaborative research project at Columbia Engineering, where Bergman, Michal Lipson, and Alexander Gaeta are conducting pioneering work in photonics and AI data systems. Their combined expertise in silicon photonics, laser design, and data center architecture laid the foundation for the ChromX platform. With the addition of Vivek Raghunathan, CEO and co-founder, and Yoshi Okawachi, the team has expanded its capabilities in key areas of photonics and AI infrastructure.

Reflecting on the company’s journey, Gaeta, co-founder and president at Xscape Photonics, a pioneer in in quantum and nonlinear photonics, and David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and professor of electrical engineering notes, “It is gratifying to see that the research from this remarkable collaboration between Keren, Michal, and my groups is being successfully commercialized. I believe it has the potential to have a broad impact on society by advancing AI and high-performance computing.”

Backed by industrial giants

The latest round of funding, led by IAG Capital Partners, saw investment from industrial pioneers like Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA, and OUP. 

Greg Maskel, technology licensing officer at Columbia Technology Ventures, emphasized the significance of their work, stating, “ Xscape’s success is due to outstanding technology arriving at a timely moment, where the infrastructure needed to power AI computing needs technologies like Xscape’s.”

Scaling for the future

With the new funding, Xscape Photonics plans to scale the production of its ChromX platform to meet the growing demand from hyperscale AI customers—massive data centers operated by tech giants that require unprecedented processing power and data throughput to support large-scale AI applications. 

Lipson, also a co-founder of Xscape Photonics, a pioneer in silicon photonics, and Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of applied physics at Columbia, expressed her excitement for the future. She says, “It is wonderful to see how the field of silicon photonics has matured. My group has been working in this field for more than two decades, and it is highly rewarding that technologies developed with Professor Gaeta and Professor Bergman will revolutionize computing as we know it.”

Lead Photo Caption: The Xscape Photonics co-founders, left to right: Vivek Raghunathan, Alexander Gaeta, Michal Lipson, Keren Bergman, and Yoshi Okawachi

Read the original story here: https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/about/news/xscape-photonics-secures-44-million-transform-ai-data-centers