Volantis raises $88 million to link AI and memory chips with laser tech

Volantis, a San Francisco-based semiconductor startup, announced Thursday it raised $88 million in venture capital to address a key AI chip bottleneck by using laser technology found in iPhones. The company aims to solve the communication limit between computing and memory chips, which currently restricts Nvidia and AMD offerings to eight memory chips per GPU. Volantis plans to use vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers to enable 220 memory chips around a GPU, delivering a chip next year. The funding round was led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with participation from John Doerr and others. CEO Tapa Ghosh said the approach leverages well-known components to avoid supply chain bottlenecks in AI chip development.