[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Swiss semiconductor company Candu AI has raised $225 million in a Series A investment round, The Next Web reported on March 28 (local time).

The investment was led by Maverick Silicon, with SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems and Alchip Technologies participating as strategic investors. In the round, Candu AI was valued at $400 million.

In the AI industry, the speed of connections between chips has already become a performance bottleneck. In training clusters made up of thousands of GPUs, the speed of data movement between processors and memory has a large impact on overall performance. At 224 gigabits per second, existing copper interconnects consume about 30 percent of a cluster's total power. Signal quality degradation is also severe, making it difficult to transmit beyond 1 meter without amplifiers.

The related industry is switching to optical fiber. Ayar Labs raised $500 million at a $3.8 billion valuation in March 2026. Marvell acquired Celestial AI, which holds photonic fabric technology, for $3.25 billion in February. The optical interconnect market for AI data centers is expected to grow to $18.36 billion in 2033 from $3.75 billion in 2025.

Candu AI says copper is not finished yet. The company says it can push copper links to more than 448 gigabits per second using coded signaling, while cutting power consumption and system costs to one-tenth.