BOSTON—Engineers working at a startup near touristy Faneuil Hall Marketplace are building chips that use laser beams instead of electrical signals to run artificial-intelligence applications 10 times faster than today’s most advanced AI computer chips, using one-tenth of the energy.
Founded in 2017 and backed by $33 million in venture-capital funding, Lightmatter Inc. is among dozens of companies gaining interest from investors and corporations because of their novel approaches to computing. They are using light, quantum physics, molecular biology and new design methods to build chips and create data-storage techniques for future computing demands.
Image: Boston-based startup Catalog Technologies Inc. recently showed it could store 14 gigabytes of data from Wikipedia in DNA molecules, which look like a few drops of water in a test tube. PHOTO: SARA CASTELLANOS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
