Neurophos Unveils Optical AI Chip with Gates Funding, Claims Superiority Over Nvidia GPUs

Neurophos, backed by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier Fund, announced its Tulkas T100 optical processing unit (OPU) on January 28, 2026, claiming it delivers 10 BINT4 performance per watt and significantly outperforms Nvidia's GPU architecture in energy efficiency. The startup targets 2028 for full-scale production and is exploring manufacturing partnerships with TSMC or Intel. The chip features a 1000x1000 photon matrix—15x larger than modern GPUs—with 56GHz clock speed, 0.47 ExaFLOPS FP4/INT4 compute, and 235 TOPS/W efficiency. Neurophos argues OPUs could reduce AI data center energy needs 100-fold versus GPU-based systems. The company completed a $110M Series A round led by Gates Frontier in January 2026 and plans a pilot with Norway's Terakraft in 2027.