News: Optoelectronics
3 June 2026
Ayar Labs joins NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem to bring CPO to rack-scale AI infrastructure
Silicon photonics-based chip-to-chip optical connectivity firm Ayar Labs of San Jose, CA, USA — which is pioneering co-packaged optics (CPO) for AI scale-up — has joined the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem, and is making its products optically and electrically compatible with NVIDIA optical and SerDes technologies. This allows hyperscalers and system innovators to build optically connected AI infrastructure around NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion platform and partner ecosystem.
As AI factories scale to larger GPU counts and increasingly heterogeneous architectures, data movement and power are turning into critical bottlenecks, notes Ayar. System designers must re-think how compute elements are connected, how bandwidth scales over distance, and how power is allocated across the rack.
Ayar Labs’ CPO solution is designed to address scaling limits by bringing high-bandwidth, low-latency, power-efficient connectivity to NVLink Fusion architectures, helping customers to expand design headroom as bandwidth requirements grow and electrical constraints tighten. By putting optics where it matters most, Ayar Labs says that its CPO enables flexible system architectures and efficient AI scaling beyond the limits of copper.
“AI infrastructure is being co-designed from the ground up, and customers need more options to scale performance efficiently as bandwidth continues to rise,” says CEO Mark Wade. “By joining the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem, we’re introducing co-packaged optics as a foundational building block for customers deploying heterogeneous compute in NVIDIA AI factories,” he adds.
“NVLink Fusion, combined with Ayar Labs’ CPO technology, gives customers more options to build heterogeneous AI factories,” says Ashish Karandikar, vice president at NVIDIA. “By expanding the NVLink Fusion ecosystem with Ayar Labs’ optical connectivity, innovators can scale bandwidth and bring heterogeneous AI infrastructure to market faster.”
The collaboration is designed to help customers deploy heterogeneous compute, including custom silicon, within NVIDIA rack-scale platforms while preserving NVLink-based architecture investments. NVLink Fusion provides a path for integrating custom CPUs and XPUs into NVIDIA’s rack-scale architecture and ecosystem, enabling customers to move more quickly from system concept to deployment at scale.
Ayar Labs’ CPO solutions complement NVIDIA’s broader AI factory stack by pairing NVLink Fusion with NVIDIA’s end-to-end networking platform. Together, these technologies support next-generation AI factories as they scale within and across racks, where bandwidth density, latency and power efficiency directly impact utilization and total cost of ownership.
Ayar Labs says that it will work with customers and ecosystem partners to align CPO integration with NVLink Fusion deployments, including system architecture, validation requirements, and platform timelines.
This announcement builds on Ayar Labs’ raising $500m in its Series E funding round, which included participation from NVIDIA.
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