Not sure what to think about these excerpts from the http://nextplatform.com  article, regarding CAI:

“The company has also attracted the interest of Broadcom, which is helping develop prototypes based on their designs, which CEO Dave Lazovsky tells the Next Platform are about 18 months from shipping to customers.”

“When Celestial first appeared early last year, the company was focused on building an AI accelerator, called Orion, which was going to employ an optical interconnect tech. Since then, the company’s focus has shifted toward licensing its Photonic Fabric to chipmakers, though Lazovsky says the company is still working on Orion.”

18 months until prototypes get shipped to customers, and the suggestion that Orion may be getting back shelf in favor of licensing, do raise concerns. 

But, I do get the sense that, right now, all of the AI players are considering card swapping, cherry picking the best in class hardware/software solutions out there for their particular product. And it’s possible that CAI, seeing that the co-developed solution with POET is clearly head and shoulders above the rest in terms of cost, power consumption and scalability, decided that rather than being intent on beating the rest, it may be far more economically advantageous to collaborate with/supply them. And the fact that the $100 million raise was announced along with the proposed modifications to market strategy, strongly suggests the funds were on board with this too.