Altman-backed Volantis reveals plan to vault the memory wall by baking photonics into AI accelerators

Sam Altman-backed AI chip startup Volantis has a plan to break through the memory wall using light, and this time it's not just an IP play. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI accelerator that will use a photonic interposer to dramatically increase memory bandwidth without compromising on capacity. Volantis believes it can pack upwards of 10 TB of memory at speeds up to 240 TB/s onto a single massive package. This, it claims, should be enough to serve a 20 trillion parameter model at 10,000 tok/s per user. To do this, Volantis is taking a somewhat unusual approach. Rather than developing some novel compute architecture or memory technology, the company is focusing its efforts on the optical interposer. Everything else it plans to license from IP providers. "The differentiation is primarily coming from the optical interposer. …