ARIA's Scaling Inference Lab deploys Lumai's optical compute technology to help power AI era

Lumai™ uses light to perform AI inference to lower data center power consumption by 90% and unlock 50x higher processing speeds

OXFORD, England, Nov. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- In a world first, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a UK public R&D funding agency, will deploy 3D optical inference technology from Lumai, the optical compute company building next-generation AI infrastructure.

With concerns about data center energy usage high on political and industrial agendas, ARIA will onboard Lumai Iris™ inference servers as the first optical inference platform in its Scaling Inference Lab - run by CommonAI CIC, a non-profit organization focused on collaborative AI development. The deployment will enable researchers to evaluate the value of optical compute in a commercial data center environment, as well as its potential to lower data center power consumption by 90%. Lumai Iris servers could also cut total cost of ownership to around one-tenth of conventional GPU architectures.

Lumai's Iris technology runs production-scale large language models (LLMs), and works by carrying out AI computation within beams of light operating in three-dimensional space, rather than just using transistors in a silicon chip. Because numbers are encoded as light intensity and passive optical components, such as lenses, are used for mathematical operations, the computation itself uses a negligible amount of energy, which barely rises as performance scales.

"Power, not demand, now limits how fast AI can be deployed," said Dr. Xianxin Guo, co-founder and CEO of Lumai. "Running a multi-node system in a commercial data center is where new compute architectures prove whether they are ready for real deployment. This collaboration at ARIA's Scaling Inference Lab validates our roadmap with a real system operating in a commercial environment."

ARIA is an independent, UK government-backed funding organization supporting advanced AI and other transformative technologies. Created by an Act of Parliament, and sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, it champions scientists and engineers pursuing ambitious ideas that could lead to major scientific and technological breakthroughs. Particularly those that benefit wider society. Its Scaling Inference Lab exists to stress-test next-generation compute architectures on real workloads in a live commercial setting - using standard power, cooling, and rack integration.

"Lumai's technology is the most mature optical compute platform we evaluated, and has the potential to make AI inference more energy-efficient and less dependent on constrained global hardware supply chains," said David Lewis, ARIA's Chief Science and Technology Officer. "The Scaling Inference Lab provides the means to test that potential openly and independently at rack scale."

A route to more efficient inference

Creating data center efficiencies will be essential as the demand for AI inference accelerates. Traditional AI inference runs electronically in silicon, which is power-hungry at scale. If relying only on these conventional accelerators to meet the computation ambition of even just one leading AI lab, it is estimated that the infrastructure bill would reach $100 trillion within the next five years. Added to this, the additional energy requirement to be in excess of 1,000 GW. These energy and cost requirements would make it impossible to meet this ambition without a change in the physics of AI computation.

Sovereign AI needs smarter compute

For the UK, the challenge is also one of sovereignty. Building the domestic AI compute capacity the country needs will depend on getting more from limited power and grid capacity, and on bringing UK-developed technologies into real data centers.

"As the UK builds out its sovereign AI compute requirements, it has to do so within the power it has. We need to find and then prove new, innovative approaches to AI compute," said Gavin Ferris, CEO of CommonAI. "The Scaling Inference Lab was set up for exactly that - to test innovative technology, such as Lumai's optical compute, on real workloads alongside today's systems."

Tackling compute-heavy prefill workloads

Large-model inference happens in two phases: prefill, which is compute-bound, and decode, which is memory-bandwidth-bound. While specialized inference hardware has increasingly focused on decode, Lumai's approach is different. It targets the compute and matrix-heavy prefill stage before the first token is generated. Lumai Iris performs millions of matrix operations in a single optical cycle.

Rather than a replacement for silicon, Iris servers are particularly effective for prefill when paired with silicon for decode - delivering at least 16x better energy efficiency per inference than silicon-only systems, addressing the power and cost ceilings now constraining AI deployment.

The ARIA deployment builds on the April 2026 launch of Iris Nova, Lumai's first product available for evaluation and the first optical AI accelerator engineered for data center-scale inference.

About Lumai

Lumai is the optical compute company advancing energy-efficient AI inference with the unique power of light. Its 3D optical computing architecture accelerates compute-intensive inference workloads beyond the energy constraints of conventional compute, helping data centers increase AI capacity within power budgets. Iris Nova, the first server in the family, is available for evaluation today. Spun out of world-leading optics research at the University of Oxford in 2021, Lumai's mission is to unlock sustainable intelligence at global scale. Lumai's work has been recognized with the Falling Walls Award for Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 and Best Overall Technology at the OCP Future Technologies Symposium, and the company is part of Intel Ignite's first London cohort. Visit Lumai at www.lumai.ai.

About ARIA

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is a UK R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. By empowering scientists to reach for the edge of the possible, ARIA pursues ambitious programmes that catalyse progress and create new communities and industries. Through bringing together scientists and engineers with diverse expertise, the agency breaks down traditional silos to chart new pathways for technological advancement. https://aria.org.uk 

About the Scaling Inference Lab

Backed by £50m from ARIA and delivered by CommonAI CIC, the Scaling Inference Lab is set up to address a key bottleneck for startups and research groups developing innovative AI hardware: the lack of an open platform to showcase their technologies due to the dominance of large, closed systems in today's AI hardware market.