Nubis Adds New Investors to Accelerate Volume Ramp of ML/AI Optics

NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nubis Communications, Inc. announced today it has accepted additional strategic investors, bringing total investment in the company to over $50 million. The company emerged from stealth in February 2023 with the first optical engine optimized from the ground up for the demanding requirements of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) cluster interconnect. Nubis recently welcomed new investors Ericsson Ventures and TDK Ventures to accelerate Nubis’ transition to high volume manufacturing in 2024.

Nubis’ technology enables a new class of high-density optical inter-connect (HDI/O) supporting full-duplex edge I/O edge densities in the 1 Tbps/mm range, very low power at 6 pJ/bit or less and standard operation in Linear Drive mode enabling the elimination of optical DSPs, saving latency, cost and power. With Large Language Model sizes growing 1,000x over the past 3 years to 175 billion parameters in GPT-3 and now to over 1.5 trillion parameters in GPT-4, data center operators are struggling to build ML/AI networks large enough to perform training and inference on these models. To support the growth of these very large ML/AI clusters, which are projected to grow from 1K xPUs to 64K over the next few years, much of the interconnect inside the data center will become optical. Nubis optics create distance-independence, connecting multiple cards within a rack and multiple pods across the datacenter, so they perform as if all the processors are on the same card.

“Our customers are demanding rapid changes in optics to quickly and dramatically improve the reliability, performance and power of optics to enable these massive new ML/AI clusters,” said Dan Harding, CEO of Nubis Communications. “Our investors recognize this and support our need to scale to volume manufacturing now to support our lead customers.”

“Connectivity and computing has entered a new era, the era of AI, where breakthrough innovations are needed to meet the new needs. The Nubis team has the deep expertise, creativity and discipline to make those breakthroughs,” commented Henry Huang, Investment Director at TDK Ventures.

Albert Kim, Head of Ericsson Ventures, stated, “Nubis is addressing one of the most fundamental connectivity challenges of our time – how to productize optical interconnect at the right performance, density, cost, reliability and power levels to enable its pervasive use in the data center for ML/AI networks to reach unprecedented scale. The market opportunity is enormous for whoever can solve this challenge and we believe that Nubis has the right team and product to win and now is the time to accelerate their transition to volume manufacturing.”

Availability
The Nubis XT1600™ optical engine is available now for sampling, please contact via https://www.nubis-inc.com.

About Nubis Communications
Nubis Communications was founded in 2020, quickly establishing a core technical team encompassing world-class expertise in silicon photonics, digital and analog IC design, as well as electronic and optical packaging.

For more information visit https://www.nubis-inc.com.

XT-1600, HDI/O and the Nubis Cloud Logo are trademarks of Nubis Communications.

About TDK Ventures
For more information visit https://tdk-ventures.com/
About Ericsson Ventures
For more information visit http://www.ericsson.com/ventures