Oxford photonic chip developer Salience Labs has closed an oversubscribed $125m (about £94m) Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and the British Business Bank among the new investors.
Salience Labs builds optical circuit switching (OCS) chips that connect GPUs inside AI data centres. Its switches keep data moving as light rather than converting it to electrical signals, which the company says cuts power consumption and latency as operators link thousands of processors across multiple racks.
The Oxford-based business draws on more than a decade of silicon photonics research and raised an $11.5m seed round in 2022. The new round is roughly ten times that figure.
The deal
Bullhound Capital led the Series B. New participants are AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Japan's SBI Group, trading firm Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank.
Existing backers Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures followed on. Callum Stewart, a principal at Bullhound Capital, joins the board.
Salience did not disclose a valuation or how much equity was sold. Bringing in the corporate venture arms of both AMD and Intel puts two of the largest chipmakers on the shareholder register as the company moves to commercial-scale manufacturing.
Use of funds
The money will fund high-volume manufacturing, deployment of the company's switches and work on its next products. Salience is working with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor to scale production.
The raise follows the company's demonstration of a 64-port all-optical switch at the ECOC 2026 conference, which it describes as an industry first for silicon photonics-based OCS. Versions with 128 and 256 ports are in development.
Salience also plans a second West Coast site to expand its Silicon Valley presence, to enter more geographic markets and to grow its engineering team.
Chief executive and co-founder Vaysh Kewada said high-performance optical switches would be needed to deliver the "token economics" that AI workloads demand as customers roll out optical links across their data centres.
Why it matters
Power has become a hard limit on AI infrastructure in the UK. Figures cited in a recent Ofgem consultation show the national electricity connection queue tripled from 41GW to 125GW between November 2024 and June 2025, and the regulator has proposed tougher entry requirements for data centre developers.
Technology that reduces the energy spent moving data between chips is drawing more investor interest as a result. Salience joins a run of large rounds for British AI hardware companies rather than model developers. Fellow Oxford chip startup Fractile raised $220m earlier this year.
For UK deep tech, the round also shows a familiar cap-table pattern: university-linked investors such as Oxford Science Enterprises and Cambridge Innovation Capital at the earliest stages, then strategic corporate capital and state co-investment through the British Business Bank at scale-up.
Original source: Tech.eu — https://tech.eu/2026/10/14/salience-labs-secures-125m-to-scale-photonic-chips-for-ai-data-centres/ (additional reporting: City AM — https://www.cityam.com/oxford-ai-chip-startup-raises-125m-to-tackle-data-centre-power-crunch/)
