Salience Labs has banked $125M in Series B funding to push all-optical circuit switching into AI data centres, with two of the chip industry’s marquee names on the ticket.
Bullhound Capital led the round. Intel Capital and AMD Ventures participated, alongside SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank. Existing backers Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also joined.
The problem Salience targets is congestion. Data centres built on legacy networking fabrics cannot keep pace with clusters that string together tens of thousands of GPUs. Interconnect bandwidth has become the choke point, and electrical switching adds latency and heat exactly where operators can least afford either.
Salience’s answer is to remove electrical signals from the path entirely. Its integrated architecture routes traffic optically on-chip, connecting thousands of GPUs across racks. The company claims lower latency and materially reduced power draw.
The raise follows a demonstration at the ECOC 2026 conference in September, where Salience showed what it calls the first 64-port all-optical photonic switch built on silicon photonics. It is now developing 128-port and 256-port versions for larger networks.
Chief executive Vaysh Kewada frames optical switching as a prerequisite rather than a luxury, arguing that high-performance optical switches are what let operators deliver the token economics AI workloads demand. The company is working with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor on manufacturing scale-up, and plans a second Silicon Valley site.
