Lumai Wins ‘Best Overall Technology Award’ at Open Compute Project Foundation Symposium

Lumai's 3D optics recognised as "a potential game changer for AI inference datacenters of the future"

Oxford, UK; 17th October 2024: The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) has crowned Lumai, the 3D optical AI startup accelerating AI deployment at scale, winner of the 'Best Overall Technology' award at the Future Technologies Symposium 2024.

Lumai was recognised for addressing AI compute through its unique 3D optics, to create technology which will achieve a 50-fold increase in AI acceleration performance. Lumai's solution only requires 10% of the energy of existing solutions and will reduce costs by 90%. As part of this recognition, the team was awarded a $10,000 prize.

The three core judging areas for the 2024 awards were innovation, the potential impact to the OCP community, and the realistic timeline to prevalence in the market. The OCP judges acknowledge that Lumai presents "a very relevant gamechanger potential for future AI data centers with its 3D optical accelerator."

On receiving the prize, Phil Burr, Head of Product at Lumai, commented "The industry recognises that the current trajectory of consuming ever-increasing energy to service AI is not sustainable. We all know that we need a different approach, and this award from OCP recognises the potential of optical compute to help solve this problem."

The Open Compute Project is a vibrant community that spans datacentre and IT infrastructure worldwide. Its Future Technologies Symposium, held in San Jose, California, brings to the OCP Community a forward-looking funnel of ideas, with a focus on solving future problems facing the industry, and accelerates product development through partnerships and collaborative R&D.
Spun out of the University of Oxford, Lumai is working with industry partners to enable AI deployment at scale using its unique 3D optical technology with the fastest, most energy-efficient AI processor. Its primary goal is to drastically cut both the energy used in datacentres for AI, as well as the cost of processing AI.

The company was part of Intel Ignite's first London cohort and a finalist in the 2023 KPMG UK Tech Innovator Programme. Its Head of Research, Dr. Xianxin Guo, was also recently chosen to join the Royal Academy of Engineering's prestigious Shott Accelerator 2024 programme.

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