Ayar Labs Closes $500M Series E, Accelerates Volume Production of Co‑Packaged Optics

SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 3, 2026 — Ayar Labs, the pioneer in co-packaged optics (CPO) for AI infrastructure, today announced the close of a $500 million Series E funding round. The round was led by Neuberger Berman and joined by premier institutional investors including ARK Invest, Insight Partners, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Sequoia Global Equities, and 1789 Capital.

The funding will accelerate volume production of Ayar Labs' TeraPHY™ optical I/O chiplet and SuperNova™ light source, enabling the company to meet growing demand from hyperscale AI infrastructure customers. Ayar Labs is now valued at $3.8 billion.

“This investment reflects the market's recognition that co-packaged optics is essential infrastructure for the AI era,” said Mark Wade, CEO and Co-Founder of Ayar Labs. “We are the only company with production-proven optical I/O chiplets that can be integrated directly into GPU and accelerator packages at scale. This funding accelerates our path to volume production and commercial deployment.”

Ayar Labs' TeraPHY™ optical engine is the industry's first UCIe-compliant co-packaged optical I/O chiplet, delivering over 8 Tbps of bandwidth per chiplet at less than 25 ns end-to-end latency. The company's technology is backed by leading semiconductor players including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel Capital.