Photonic supercomputing company Lightmatter has raised $154 million in a series C funding round. The company said that it will leverage the financing to deliver its photonic technology to cloud providers, semiconductor companies, and enterprises for higher performance and energy efficiency in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing workloads. “Rapid progress in artificial intelligence is forcing computing infrastructure to improve at an unprecedented rate,” said Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nick Harris. “The energy costs of this growth are significant, even on a planetary scale.” According to Harris, generative AI and supercomputing are both poised for a transformation driven by photonic technologies in the coming years. As Lightmatter moves toward sending product to customers, the company will build on its current offerings: a general-purpose machine learning accelerator that combines photonics and transistor-based systems; a wafer-scale, programmable photonic interconnect that enables arrays of heterogeneous chips to communicate; and standard deep learning frameworks and model exchange formats. The company’s photonic interconnect features transistors and photonics integrated side by side to provide an interface that allows 40 passage lanes to fit in the space of a single optical fiber. The architecture reduces packaging complexity and cost while increasing performance.