News: Optoelectronics
9 September 2025
Ayar Labs and Alchip to scale AI infrastructure with co-packaged optics
Silicon photonics-based chip-to-chip optical connectivity firm Ayar Labs of San Jose, CA, USA — which is pioneering co-packaged optics (CPO) for large-scale AI workloads — and high-performance ASIC design firm Alchip Technologies Ltd of Taipei, Taiwan have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate AI scale-up infrastructure. The collaboration fulfills hyperscaler demands for advanced AI accelerators and platforms that deliver enhanced performance, efficiency and scalability.
This new partnership brings together Ayar Labs’ CPO technology, Alchip’s advanced packaging expertise, and TSMC’s advanced packaging and process technologies to build a robust ecosystem to accelerate the production and adoption of optical engines.
“Ayar Labs’ co-packaged optics technology unlocks the next era of AI infrastructure by removing the limitations of copper interconnects,” says the firm’s CEO & co-founder Mark Wade. “By combining our optical I/O innovation with Alchip’s deep expertise in advanced packaging, we’re building an ecosystem to accelerate the transition to power-efficient, high-performance AI systems.”
Since traditional copper-based interconnects can no longer keep pace with AI workloads, the new partnership helps to overcome legacy performance bottlenecks to enable multi-rack scale-up system architectures by implementing Ayar Labs’ optical I/O technology into Alchip’s high-performance ASICs. This unlocks high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity for extended memory and computing resources across larger systems and data centers, improving interactivity while reducing power consumption.
“Current and future AI workloads require innovative and often collaborative advanced packaging design expertise and production-ready solutions. Alchip has proven to the market that it has the entire skill set to serve tier 1 hyperscale customers,” says Alchip’s chairman & CEO Johnny Shen. “We’re working with Ayar Labs to bring leading-edge optical I/O technology to demanding high-performance next-gen designs, helping hyperscalers achieve new levels of data throughput and energy efficiency.”
Using TSMC’s packaging and silicon technologies, including COUPE, TSMC-SoIC, and advanced process nodes, Ayar Labs and Alchip are addressing critical data movement bottlenecks and enabling new system architectures. The result is a scalable, repeatable path for next-generation AI infrastructure CPO adoption.