Salience Labs raises $125M for optical AI switches, then expands in California

Salience Labs's $125 million Series B funding round, led by Bullhound Capital and joined by AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and the British Business Bank, will be used to scale manufacturing of its optical AI switches and to open a second West Coast office in California. For website owners, the deployment of Salience Labs’ high‑speed optical switching hardware means AI‑driven services—especially large‑scale language models and generative image systems—will be able to route traffic with dramatically lower latency and higher throughput. This surge in AI‑generated requests can inflate bot traffic volumes, strain server resources, and increase the likelihood of unintended crawling of dynamic pages. Moreover, the new West Coast hub will place many AI workloads physically closer to U.S. data centers, potentially altering the geographic distribution of bot hits on your site. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly allow or block the IP ranges associated with Salience Labs’ optical switches (often published in their developer portal) to control which AI bots can access large language model endpoints on your domain. 2. Deploy real‑time AI‑bot analytics in llmscentral.com to flag sudden spikes in request rates that match the latency profile of optical switching, enabling you to throttle or challenge traffic before it overwhelms your infrastructure. 3. Configure rate‑limiting rules that differentiate between standard web crawlers and high‑frequency AI inference calls, ensuring legitimate SEO bots remain unaffected while protecting resource‑intensive endpoints.