Photonics startup Neurophos, incubated at Duke University, raised $110 million in Series A funding led by Gates Frontier to develop its "super-surface modulator" optical processing unit (OPU). The company claims that its chip uses optical properties for artificial intelligence matrix calculations, operating at a frequency of up to 56GHz, with a processing speed of 235 million billion operations per second (235 Peta Operations per Second), and a power consumption of only 675 watts. It significantly outperforms NVIDIA's B200 GPU in both AI inference speed and energy efficiency. Neurophos expects its first chips to be available by mid-2028 and states that these chips can be manufactured using standard silicon wafer foundry processes.