CamGraPhIC, the subsidiary and research arm of Italy’s 2D Photonics Group, has been given approval by the European Commission for €211 million in funding by the Italian State to build a new class of optical technology designed to work out how data moves inside advanced computing systems.

“This investment goes straight to the heart of what’s limiting AI today,” said Ben Jensen, CEO of 2D Photonics.

“Compute keeps getting faster, but data movement hasn’t kept pace. Graphene-based optical technology offers a way to move vastly more data using far less power, which is exactly what the next generation of AI systems will require.”

CamGraPhIC said: “Today’s AI systems are no longer held back by a lack of computing power.

“Instead, performance is increasingly constrained by the flow of data between chips, accelerators, and memory. As models grow larger and hardware becomes more dense, existing electrical and silicon photonic interconnects struggle to keep up, consuming more power, generating more heat, and slowing systems down.”

CamGraPhIC said it is tackling the problem head-on with graphene-based optical input/output (Optical I/O) technology that replaces existing slower, power-hungry, and high latency optical links.

By using graphene, a material with exceptional electronic and optical properties, the company’s approach enables a large increase in bandwidth density, while delivering lower latency and significantly lower energy consumption compared to the best silicon photonics available today, directly addressing one of the biggest obstacles to scaling AI and high-performance computing.

The €211 million will be one of the largest single public investments ever made in an Italian deep-tech startup and will place the company among a small group of companies globally working to redefine how data is moved inside future AI infrastructure.