Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only been part of public discourse for a few years, but it is already impacting industries as diverse as healthcare, finance, and robotics. Proponents believe that AI has the potential to change lives with its ability to process vast amounts of data and automate complex tasks. However, the demands of AI growth require increasing computational power and greater data movement efficiency.
Celestial AI, founded in 2020, is addressing the challenges of this new era with its novel Photonic Fabric technology. Photonic Fabric allows AI compute to be scaled—within package and package-to-package across multiple racks. The company’s platform serves deep learning and machine learning applications, combining the advantages of photonics, mixed-signal integrated circuits, and packaging to offer a sustainable improvement in computing performance.
The company was founded by semiconductor industry veterans David Lazovsky and Preet Virk, but seeds of its innovation sprung from UC Santa Barbara and Distinguished Professor Emeritus John Bowers’ novel technology. Celestial seeks to revolutionize AI data centers by enabling continued scaling of model sizes, better reasoning and more efficient inference with increasing context lengths and batch sizes. The technology has the potential to impact many facets of daily life.
In February 2026, Celestial AI was acquired by Marvell Technology, allowing Marvell to enter the photonic networking technology space.