Oriole Networks Raises £17.5M to Cut the Energy Cost of AI Computing

Oriole Networks, the London-based deep tech company developing energy-efficient technologies for machine learning and high-performance computing infrastructure, has raised £17.5 million. The round was led by XTX Ventures, the investment arm of quantitative trading firm XTX Markets, with participation from Clean Growth Fund, Dorilton Ventures, Plural, and UCL Technology Fund.

Oriole was founded to address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in the AI compute stack: the energy consumed by moving data between chips. In modern AI data centres, a substantial fraction of total energy consumption comes not from computation itself, but from the electrical interconnects that shuttle data between processors, memory, and network switches. As AI models grow larger and inference workloads scale, this interconnect bottleneck becomes increasingly acute.

Oriole’s technology is built around photonic interconnects — using light rather than electricity to transmit data between components. Optical data transfer is fundamentally more energy-efficient than electrical signalling at high bandwidths and distances, and Oriole has developed approaches that allow photonic interconnect technology to be integrated into existing semiconductor manufacturing processes, addressing one of the key barriers to practical deployment.

The company’s focus on reducing the energy intensity of AI infrastructure is timely. Data centre power consumption is projected to grow dramatically as AI workloads expand, and energy efficiency has become a central constraint on the pace of AI scaling. XTX Ventures’ lead investment reflects both the fund’s deep understanding of computational infrastructure and the growing commercial urgency of the problem Oriole is solving.

The £17.5 million raise will fund the continued development of Oriole’s photonic interconnect platform, team growth, and the build-out of its first demonstration systems with hardware partners.