https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justinkinseysbt_semiconductor-semiconductorindustry-ai-activity-7095418676895440896-heHj/

This year has been marked by a number of breakthroughs in hardware for AI acceleration and has seen some 100+ new companies enter the race. Recently I received an avalanche of dm's in response to my TOP 13 AI companies to bet on the list. By far, the loudest outcry was for Celestial AI After looking under the hood and talking with several industry peers, I must admit, they are definitely deserving of attention.

Accelerated compute is an advancement that hyperscalers are clamoring for as they race to deliver leading-edge performance for compute-heavy workloads, such as training next-generation large language models. Yet data center operators find themselves at a crossroads of opportunity and economics.

Current infrastructure setups mean that scaling compute comes with a requisite burden of acquiring large amounts of additional memory - one of the most expensive elements of the system - and being unable to decouple compute from memory is an escalating problem because memory capacity per processor is not keeping pace. This is a problem referred to as the “the memory wall”. In addition to increasing the cost, that memory capacity is often underutilized which is an inefficiency that is hard to ignore.

There are a handful of intrepid companies working on solutions, including developing chip architectures that move compute and memory closer and leverage advanced packaging technologies like chiplets. But there are limitations to what is possible with electrical interconnectivity.

Enter optical interconnect technology, which promises to usher in a new era of compute using photonics to move data at lightspeed. One of the pioneering companies in this space is Celestial AI, who have worked closely with the hyperscalers and have created Photonic Fabric, which the company describes as an optical interconnect platform that provides the technology for optically scalable, disaggregated data center compute and memory. This opens the potential for memory pooling and an order-of-magnitude increase in data movement.

Celestial is helmed by founder and CEO David Lazovsky, as well as COO Preet Virk and their technical direction is being led by CTO Philip Winterbottom. All three have made significant contributions to advancing optoelectrical interconnect technology in their earlier careers, and investor confidence in Celestial’s team is apparent.

Maximizing efficiency in the data center is imperative for operators. They need to reconfigure or risk succumbing to the crushing economics of compute power, which has become a dual-edged sword. Analysts estimate the interconnect sector to potentially be a $70 billion market, which is a massive, once-in-a-generation opportunity for companies that can move fast and deliver. Without a doubt, this will breed a couple of new unicorns.

Were I to extend the original list previously mentioned, Celestial.ai would undoubtedly be ranked among those I would bet on.