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 integrates optical connectivity directly alongside the chips responsible for moving data through AI systems.

But that creates another problem: the industry needs a vastly greater supply of the lasers that generate that light.

Today’s high-power laser supply chain was largely built for telecom and subsea networks, where volumes are far lower. AI could transform the laser from a specialist photonics component into something that has to be manufactured at semiconductor scale.

Photon Bridge has designed its technology around that transition. Rather than generating the required optical power using a small number of increasingly powerful lasers, Photon Bridge combines and multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers. Lower power densities make individual lasers less sensitive to manufacturing defects, improving production yield and allowing Photon Bridge’s architecture to scale more efficiently as volumes increase.

The platform is designed to deliver high wavelength counts with up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fibre, while enabling production across multiple indium phosphide (InP) foundries.

“AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built,” said Paul Marchal, CEO of Photon Bridge. 

“We are moving towards enormous systems in which hundreds of thousands of processors have to operate together, and moving data between them is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance.

“That means optics has to move closer to the compute. But it also creates an entirely different manufacturing challenge.

The industry will soon need millions of these laser sources every year. Instead of making individual lasers increasingly powerful and difficult to manufacture, we move that scaling challenge into the architecture.”

Photon Bridge’s approach centres on manufacturing yield, a consideration that becomes increasingly important as laser production shifts from traditional telecom volumes to the scale AI infrastructure requires.

“Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one," said Ion Hauer, Investment Partner at APEX Ventures. 

"Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale.”

“AI is turning lasers from a telecom component into a semiconductor-scale product,” said Cesare Maifredi, Partner at 360 Capital.

“Once you start talking about millions of units a year, manufacturing yield becomes fundamental. Photon Bridge has designed its architecture from the beginning around the volumes this market is going to require.”