On May 29, AMD announced that it has acquired Enosemi, a silicon photonics startup, as of last week. Previously, Enosemi had served as an external photonics development partner for AMD. The company stated that Enosemi is an ideal acquisition to advance its innovation in high-performance interconnects, and that this transaction will immediately enhance AMD’s capacity to support and develop a wide range of photonics and co-packaged optics solutions for next-generation AI systems 1.
Enosemi is a Silicon Valley-based startup focused on silicon photonics. Founded in 2023 by Ari Novack and Matthew Streshinsky, the company specializes in the manufacturing and sales of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Enosemi’s main product line includes optical interconnect solutions designed to integrate computing and networking components within data centers 1.
A core strength of Enosemi lies in the mass production of silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Its technology can integrate optical engines with compute chips, such as CPUs or GPUs, within the same package, effectively replacing traditional copper cable connections. Compared to copper-based solutions, co-packaged optics (CPO) can deliver ten times the bandwidth density, reduce power consumption by 30%, and minimize data transmission latency — all of which are critical for AI clusters at scale. For example, training large-scale models with trillions of parameters may require over 100,000 optical interconnect devices, and traditional solutions face significant heat dissipation and signal degradation challenges. CPO technology overcomes these “bandwidth wall” limitations by enabling direct optical interconnection 1.