# ARIA lab to test Lumai optical AI servers in commercial data centre

_Published Tuesday, November 3, 2026 at 1:24 PM EST · AI, Infrastructure · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![ARIA lab to test Lumai optical AI servers in commercial data centre — Primary](https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/10/ai-microchip-green-pastel-reflective-surface.jpg)

The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency will test Lumai's light-based AI servers in a commercial data centre, the Oxford startup said Tuesday. The Scaling Inference Lab, backed by £50M from ARIA and run by nonprofit CommonAI, will install Iris servers as its first optical computing platform.

The tests will run across several machines with real AI models, power and cooling. Lumai encodes data into beams of light to perform calculations, with conventional electronics handling other operations. Its hardware targets the stage when a model reads a prompt; ordinary chips would still generate the answer. Lumai's claimed energy savings have not been independently checked.

## Sources

- [The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/aria-scaling-inference-lab-lumai-optical-servers)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/hBxCBa82rf9CF9aRd8ncXS
Published: 2026-11-03T18:24:02.678Z
Story chronology: 2026-11-03T17:29:03.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-11-03T20:40:57.526Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)