Oriole Networks deploys photonic AI network in first commercial rollout with AMD
U.K. photonic networking startup Oriole Networks Ltd. today announced that it will deploy what it describes as the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence system running on a pure photonic network, marking the first commercial use of its technology.
The deployment, built in collaboration with Advanced Micro Devices Inc., forms part of the U.K. Advanced Research and Invention Agency’s Scaling Inference Lab, a testbed backed by £50 million ($66.6 million) set up to tackle bottlenecks in large-scale AI workloads. The system pairs Oriole’s networking hardware with AMD Instinct graphics processing units and AMD EPYC central processing units.
Oriole is contributing PRISM, a networking platform that routes data as photons rather than electrical signals. The system replaces the electronic switches at the core of a data center network with nanosecond-scale optical circuit switching. AMD is supplying the compute hardware and technical support to build and run network models at frontier scale.
Conventional data center networks rely on electrical switches that draw heavy power and generate substantial heat. That has become a growing constraint as AI workloads push thousands of chips to exchange data trillions of times per second. Oriole says removing electronic switches cuts core power consumption by 81% and drops graphics processing unit idle time from about 60% today to less than 1%. It says the approach also lowers cooling demands and cuts water use.
