Dutch photonics startup Photon Bridge raises €10M to tackle AI's looming laser bottleneck

Dutch photonics company  Photon Bridge has raised €10 million to tackle an emerging bottleneck in AI infrastructure: producing the millions of lasers that will be needed to connect increasingly large clusters of AI processors. The round was co-led by new investors, the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital, with existing investors Innovation Industries, Faber, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) also increasing their investment. Omdia forecasts that more than 20 million data-centre AI accelerators will ship annually by 2028. As AI clusters grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors, moving data between those chips is becoming one of the fundamental constraints on their performance. Optical connections can move enormous amounts of data faster and more efficiently than conventional electrical interconnects, and are consequently moving progressively closer to the processors themselves. This shift is accelerating with the emergence of co-packaged optics, which in