EDBI and Peak XV Join Lumilens' US$700M Bet on Replacing Data Centre Copper With Light

For two years, the story of the AI boom has been about chips — who can make them, who can buy them, and how many a company can stack into a data centre. The industry is now hitting a different wall: the wiring. Every GPU added to a cluster multiplies the optical connections needed, and the copper cables inside server racks can only carry an electrical signal about a metre and a half before it degrades. That bottleneck is where Singapore's EDBI has quietly placed a big bet.

The Singapore government's investment arm joined Peak XV and a roster of global funds in Lumilens' Series C of more than US$700 million, valuing the San Jose-based startup at US$5.51 billion and pushing its total raised past US$900 million. The two-year-old company emerged from stealth on Aug 6 claiming its optical interconnects — silicon photonics, mixed-signal chips and co-packaged optics that replace copper with light — are already shipping into a hyperscaler's live data centres under a multi-billion-dollar agreement. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital, with Qualcomm Ventures, J.P. Morgan Private Capital and HarbourVest also in.

Lumilens' pitch is that AI's constraint has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many you can connect. A single 400,000-GPU site needs more than 2.4 million optical transceivers, and the market cannot keep up. Founder Ankur Singla, who previously sold Contrail to Juniper and Volterra to F5, is entering a crowded race — Nvidia and Broadcom are pushing into photonics, and Chinese rivals like Eoptolink are chasing the same prize. What sets Lumilens apart for now is a product already inside a working data centre.

For Singapore, the interesting part is EDBI's pattern, not just this one cheque. The investor was also in HyperLight's US$80 million Series C earlier this year — another photonics bet. As Singapore positions itself as a regional AI and data centre hub, its state investor is buying into the layer underneath the compute itself: the connectivity that determines whether all those GPUs actually behave like one machine.

Why it matters for Singapore: EDBI's mandate ties returns to benefits for Singapore's economy, which makes this round a signal about where the city-state's AI infrastructure ambitions are heading. As hyperscaler data centres multiply in the region and AI workloads demand faster networks, Singapore-linked capital is now inside the global supply chain that decides how those centres get built. For the local ecosystem, it is also proof that deep-tech investing has moved beyond software into the physical layer of AI.