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(Bloomberg) — Italy awarded a €211 million ($249 million) grant to a company seeking to speed up processing at artificial intelligence data centers as part of a bid to support local startups.
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2D Photonics Group’s Camgraphic subsidiary will use the funds to develop graphene-based photonics technology, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. 2D Photonics also committed to build a pilot manufacturing plant near Milan, where it will seek to move graphene photonics from the research phase to actual production. The company didn’t provide further details on the conditions of the grant.
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Silicon photonics uses light to transmit data and has the potential to be faster and more power-efficient than older copper-based connections in data centers. 2D Photonics is betting that incorporating graphene will improve energy efficiency and bandwidth, helping reduce the huge amount of electricity consumed when training AI.
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Companies selling technology that can optimize data center performance are seeing surging demand from large US tech companies, which are spending hundreds of billions this year to build out infrastructure for AI. Lumentum Holdings Inc., which makes devices that enable high-speed data transmission, said last week that its order books are full through 2028. Lumentum and rival Coherent Corp. received $2 billion each in investment from Nvidia Corp. last month.
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“This investment goes straight to the heart of what’s limiting AI today,” 2D Photonics Chief Executive Officer Ben Jensen said. “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.”
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The grant was cleared by the European Commission and is considered state aid, the company said. The Italian grant will be among the largest public investments in an Italian deep-tech startup, it said.
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2D Photonics investors include CDP Venture Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, Join Capital, Sony Innovation Fund and Bosch Ventures.
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