Salience Labs raises $125M for all-optical AI data center switches

Salience Labs has raised $125 million to scale up switches that move data between AI chips using light alone. The Series B round, announced on October 14, 2026, was led by Bullhound Capital. Intel Capital and AMD Ventures, the investment arms of two of the biggest chipmakers, also took part. The bet is that as AI clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the network that links them needs a faster, lower-power design.

The round

According to SiliconANGLE and Tech.eu, the investors are:

Role	Investors
Lead	Bullhound Capital
New investors	Intel Capital, AMD Ventures, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, British Business Bank
Returning investors	Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Silicon Catalyst Ventures

Tech.eu describes the round as oversubscribed. Callum Stewart, a principal at Bullhound Capital, joins the board. Neither report gives a valuation or a total raised to date.

What Salience builds

Inside an AI data center, thousands of GPUs must constantly swap data. Most data centers do that with electronic switches. The signal travels as light over fiber, gets converted to electricity for the switch, then back to light. SiliconANGLE describes that repeated conversion as inefficient for AI work.

Salience's switch keeps the signal as light the whole way, using silicon photonics, which builds optical parts on chips. This approach is called optical circuit switching. The company says it is designed to connect thousands of GPUs across many server racks.

Salience showed a 64-port all-optical switch at the ECOC 2026 conference in September. It calls this an industry first for silicon photonics. Versions with 128 and 256 ports are in development.

"Optical circuit switching will play a critical role in AI data center networking," said Vaysh Kewada, Salience's chief executive and co-founder.

Srini Ananth of Intel Capital said the company "stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification."

What the money is for

Salience plans to use the funds to deploy its switches and expand high-volume manufacturing, Tech.eu reports. It is scaling production with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor. It also plans a second location in Silicon Valley and to enter more markets. Part of the money goes to next-generation switches and a larger engineering team.

The market is growing. Analyst firm Cignal AI forecasts that optical circuit switching will be worth more than $8 billion by the end of the decade, SiliconANGLE reports.

Neither report names customers, and neither gives power or speed figures for the switch.

What this means for developers

For teams that build or run AI infrastructure:

• The network is the next bottleneck. As clusters grow, moving data between GPUs costs time and power. Optical switches are one answer chipmakers are now funding directly.
• Watch for real numbers. Salience has not published power or latency figures. Ask for them, and for customer results, before planning around the technology.
• Chipmakers are hedging. Both Intel and AMD invested. Expect optical networking to show up in their data center plans.
• Port counts set cluster size. A 64-port switch is the start. The 128- and 256-port versions in development would let one switch link more GPUs directly.