Altman-backed Volantis reveals plan to vault the memory wall by baking photonics into AI accelerators
Who said you had to use wires to connect memory to compute?
Startup Volantis, backed by Sam Altman, aims to break the AI memory wall using photonics. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based company is developing an AI accelerator with a photonic interposer to boost memory bandwidth dramatically without sacrificing capacity. The company believes it can pack up to 10 TB of memory at speeds of 240 TB/s onto a single package, enough to support a 20 trillion parameter model at 10,000 tokens per second per user.
Volantis is taking a unique approach by focusing on the optical interposer rather than developing new compute architecture or memory technology. CEO Tapa Ghosh explains that this allows them to integrate the interposer and achieve high-bandwidth memory close to the compute, minimizing power consumption and maximizing signal integrity. Modern GPUs are limited by their shoreline, the physical perimeter around the chip, which caps their maximum capacity and bandwidth.
Volantis plans to use optical waveguides integrated into an interposer to achieve a photonic interconnect that extends the memory much farther than electrical interconnects. While they haven't specified the memory technology yet, the company's approach differs from other photonics startups like Lightmatter and Celestial AI, which aimed to license their tech to other chipmakers. Volantis, however, aims to develop a fully-fledged inference chip.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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