Kandou AI Raises $225 Million to Build Copper Chip Interconnects for AI Infrastructure

Kandou AI, a Swiss semiconductor company specializing in chip-to-chip interconnect technology, has raised $225 million in new funding to advance its bet that copper can outperform optical fiber for AI infrastructure, The Next Web reports. The company builds high-speed copper-based data links designed for the dense, short-range connections inside AI servers and data centers. As AI clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of chips, the interconnect problem has become a critical bottleneck. The prevailing assumption has been that optical fiber will dominate at scale, but Kandou argues that copper interconnects can match optical performance at lower cost and power consumption for the distances involved in large AI training systems. The $225 million round signals significant investor conviction in that thesis.