SAN JOSE, Calif. – Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions for AI scale-up, won the Demo of the Year Award at the 2026 TSMC North America Technology Symposium, in Santa Clara, California. The award is presented annually to the most popular demo, as chosen by visitors to the “Innovate with TSMC!” Demo Zone—a platform showcasing innovations from TSMC’s emerging customers at the Technology Symposium.
Ayar Labs’ award-winning demonstration showcased its manufacturing-ready optical interconnect solution integrated into a chassis-level AI server reference design developed with Wiwynn. Built on Ayar Labs’ optical engine technology, the solution is designed to integrate across multiple form factors to meet different system and packaging requirements. The system pairs two AI accelerators, each with eight TeraPHY™ optical engines, to deliver more than 100 terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth per accelerator, powered by SuperNova™ external light sources in the industry-standard ELSFP form factor. The demonstration highlighted how optical connectivity can extend high-bandwidth scale-up beyond the rack.
“Being voted Demo of the Year by the TSMC community is a meaningful validation of our team’s work to bring optical interconnect solutions to AI scale-up,” said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs. “As AI enters the inference era, scaling compute is no longer just about more silicon; it’s about rethinking how systems are connected. Together with TSMC and its ecosystem, we’re enabling a new class of AI infrastructure where optical connectivity extends scale-up beyond the boundaries of the rack.”
Ayar Labs’ optical engines are built using TSMC’s Compact Universal Photonic Engine (TSMC-COUPE™) platform for advanced photonic integration, fabrication, and packaging to deliver the bandwidth, power efficiency, low latency, and scalability needed to connect GPUs and accelerators across racks. TeraPHY brings together electronic and photonic functions in a compact optical engine to support high-performance scale-up networking for AI inference and agentic workloads.
“Our collaboration with Ayar Labs on TSMC-COUPE™ is driving innovative optical interconnect solutions that are critical for AI scale-up,” said Lipen Yuan, Vice President of Business Development at TSMC. “TSMC is committed to empowering customers with leading technologies, robust manufacturing, and a strong ecosystem to help turn their ideas into reality. We look forward to continuing our work with industry innovators like Ayar Labs to advance next-generation AI infrastructure.”
The recognition follows a year of significant ecosystem and market momentum for Ayar Labs. The company raised $650 million in equity capital to scale manufacturing and joined NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem to bring CPO to rack-scale AI infrastructure. Most recently, Ayar Labs, Wiwynn and GUC presented the first live demonstration of an integrated optical compute system that pairs GUC’s ASIC with Ayar Labs’ TeraPHY optical engine and SuperNova light source, including real-time health telemetry, at the OCP Global Summit 2026.
For more information on Ayar Labs’ CPO solution, visit ayarlabs.com.
