Data centers consume 4.4% of US electricity in 2023, and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy that a data center sucks helps transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is speeding up the process while making it more energy efficient.
Canada-based Hyperlume’s Ottawa has created a Micro Red version that allows information to be transferred faster than the copper-based connections commonly found between racks in data centers. These microrings also provide less energy to transfer data than copper wires.
Mohsen Asad, co-founder and CEO of Hyperlume, told TechCrunch it was a “logical extension” of the work the company and his co-founder Hossein Fariborzi did before they founded the company. Asad’s electrical engineering background led him to a career focused on figuring out how to transfer data between chips and racks. Fariborgi has expertise in low power electrical circuit design.
“I was working on Micro Red and I was working on data transfer. The AI of this boom and the requirements for sending information from chip to chip to power consumption were all put together naturally.” Assad said. “We have found a huge market opportunity.”
Energy consumption and latency have always been a problem for chip-to-chip communications in data centers, but have been exacerbated by rising AI and a broken pace. Resolving latency issues, or data latency, not only speeds up existing links between chips, but also unlocks chip capacity that is previously inaccessible due to latency bottlenecks, ASAD adds I did.
“If we can actually solve this latency problem, then (chips) will work together faster,” Assad said. “If you have a big language model (…), you need a chip to communicate with near zero latency.”
When Asad and Fariborzi launched Hyperlume in 2022, they began thinking about how to use existing technology to tackle data center latency issues. Silicon was a potential option to connect chips, but it’s too expensive for use on a large scale. Laser has also reduced costs.
So Hyperroom settled on taking inexpensive microrings and modifying them to transfer information from chip to chip very quickly, almost mimicking how fiber connections can be made without the associated costs .
“The secret source is super fast microred, with the other side a low-power ASIC that drives everything and communicates with the other chips,” Assad said.
Hyperlume works with a handful of early customers (mostly in North America) while tweaking their products. The company has attracted a lot of inbound interest, particularly from hyperschool, Asad said, along with cable manufacturers and companies in other industries that could benefit from the technology.
“The first stage for us is to work with these early adopters. As soon as technology proves and enters early adopters and data centers, we expand to work with the rest of the market. You will be given the opportunity to do so,” Assad said. “The demand is there, and it grows and grows every year.”
Hyperlume recently raised a $12.5 million seed round led by BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund and Arctern Ventures, with supporters such as Muus Climate Partners, Intel Capital and SOSV.
The new capital will be used to hire more engineers and accumulate the funds needed to continue developing Hyperlume technology. In the future, the company wants to increase its bandwidth, making it technically ready for the next generation of powerful data centers.
“Now we’re focusing on optical connections, we’re focusing on connecting chips and connecting boards, but the way we see our company grow is to become an AI connectivity solution provider. ” says Asad.