London tech startup Oriole Networks has secured £10m in a seed round to support its mission to speed up and reduce emissions involved in the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models using data centres.
The University College London (UCL) spin-out created in 2023 has found a way to connect thousands of AI chips together, which can train large language models (LLMs) up to a hundred times faster using only “a fraction” of the energy usually needed.
LLMs are machine learning models such as ChatGPT that can understand and generate human language text.
Oriole chief executive James Regan said: “As the demand for computing continues to increase, it is critical to find new solutions that can address these challenges in a sustainable and carbon-efficient manner.
“Our novel approach to harness the power of light has already demonstrated significant technical performance improvements, up to 100 times speed up in completion time and 40 times improvements in energy consumption.”
The funding round for the London tech startup was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures and Dorilton Ventures.
Daniel Freeman, general partner at Dorilton Ventures, said: “We invest in companies in the IT infrastructure, data science, and cyber security segments whose products support computationally driven businesses.
“Over the last decade, compute performance has improved ten times faster than networking performance, so HPC environments are highly network constrained. Oriole’s exciting approach can unlock the latent potential in existing infrastructure,” he added.
Demand for data centres is increasing as tech giants look for space to create their generative AI-powered products, such as LLMs, which became mainstream last year.
But it comes amid mounting concerns over the growing energy consumption and associated carbon emissions of LLMs that need colossal server farms cooled by water.
By one estimate, training OpenAI’s GPT-3 in Microsoft’s data centres can directly evaporate 700,000 litres of water.
Beverley Gower-Jones OBE, managing partner of Clean Growth Fund, said: “The world’s data centres already consume as much electricity as the whole of the UK, and it is rising rapidly, threatening to consume as much as the whole of Europe unless something is done. This radical approach to Net Zero innovation is exactly what is needed.”