16:40 – 17:00
Ankur Aggarwal, Ph.D.
Celestial AI
Dr. Ankur Aggarwal is Vice President of Advanced Packaging & Supply Chain at Celestial AI, the creators of the Photonic Fabric™— optical scale-up networks for accelerated computing. Since joining Celestial in 2022 in its early stages, Dr. Aggarwal has been instrumental in pioneering Celestial AI’s breakthrough in Photonic Fabric™ architecture—driving innovations such as optically accessible 2.5D and 3D packages and photonically bridged packages that are redefining the limits of compute scaling, performance, bandwidth, and power efficiency in AI systems.
Prior to Celestial AI, Dr. Aggarwal held senior engineering and strategic leadership roles at Intel, Finisar, and II-VI Incorporated, where he shaped the development and scaling of advanced semiconductor and photonics platforms. At II-VI, he led global procurement efforts, architecting one of the industry’s most sophisticated and far-reaching photonics supply chains, aligning operational execution with long-term strategic goals across diverse technology ecosystems. Dr. Aggarwal holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelors in Engineering from IIT Varanasi.
Celestial AI
Company Profile
AI is touching our lives and driving breakthroughs in healthcare, finance, autonomous systems, and countless other domains. Its ability to process vast data, derive insights, and automate complex tasks unlocks new levels of efficiency and innovation. However, the exponential growth of AI workloads demands greater computational power and more efficient data movement. Traditional electronic interconnects are struggling to keep up, necessitating a paradigm shift in AI infrastructure.
The answer is like night and day.
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric is a revolutionary technology that scales AI compute within package and package-to-package across multiple racks. It forms the foundation for an optical scale-up network, overcoming the physical limitations of electronic interconnects. Offering terabytes of low-latency bandwidth, in-network computing, and high-performance memory, Photonic Fabric heralds a new dawn in AI infrastructure.
Switching to optical interconnects enables larger multi-die packages and bigger scale-up domains, creating a leap into the next decade. Photonic Fabric-based products transform AI data centers, scaling thousands of XPUs across racks, enabling larger models, better reasoning, and more efficient inference. By reducing total cost of ownership, this innovation unlocks new use cases and more profitable GenAI business models.
With an aggressive roadmap, a robust ecosystem of partners, and a tier-one supply chain, Celestial AI isn’t just reimagining AI data centers, it’s delivering an AI-driven, sustainable future. At its core, AI isn’t just about algorithms or hardware, it’s about people. Unlocking creativity, solving humanity’s biggest challenges, and making the impossible possible. The future of AI is here. Intelligence, illuminated.
