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In a world first, ARIA’s Scaling Inference Lab will deploy Lumai's 3D optical inference technology, to evaluate whether computing with light can cut data centre power use by up to 90%.

The Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) will deploy 3D optical inference technology from Oxford-based Lumai in its Scaling Inference Lab, run by CommonAI CIC. This will be the world's first rack-scale optical inference platform, and the first to be deployed in ARIA's Scaling Inference Lab. Lumai’s Iris servers will be open for researchers to evaluate optical compute in a commercial data centre environment. Instead of transistors in a silicon chip, the technology carries out AI computation in beams of light. Lumai says it could cut data centre power consumption by up to 90%, and that paired with silicon for decode, it delivers at least 16x better energy efficiency per inference. The Scaling Inference Lab, backed by £50m from ARIA, exists to test next-generation compute architectures on real workloads using standard power, cooling and rack integration.