SAN FRANCISCO, March 11 (Reuters) - Scintil Photonics, a

French startup backed by Nvidia ( NVDA ), on Wednesday said it has

started providing laser chips to customers for testing.

Scintil is one of a number of startups working out how to move

information around inside artificial intelligence servers such

as those made by Nvidia ( NVDA ) and Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD )

using pulses of light rather than electrical signals, a

move that could ease the task of linking many chips together to

form one large computer. Analysts expect Nvidia ( NVDA ) to reveal more

about its plans for the technology, called co-packaged optics,

at its developer conference in Silicon Valley next week.

All optical systems rely on a laser chip to generate the beams

of light that will carry information, and those chips, made with

a special material called indium phosphide and mostly used in

long-distance communications networks, are not currently made in

large enough volumes to meet the demand from AI data centers.

That supply dynamic drove Nvidia ( NVDA ) earlier this month to invest $2

billion each in two of the largest makers of those lasers,

Lumentum ( LITE ) and Coherent.

Scintil, which secured funding from Nvidia ( NVDA ) in a $58 million

funding round last year, has come up with a way to package

indium phosphide lasers with some of the other elements needed

for optical communications into a single chip, working with

Israel-based Tower Semiconductor as a manufacturing

partner.

Matt Crowley, Scintil's CEO, said the company is in

discussions with "six companies, seven companies" that want to

use its technology by 2028 but declined to name them, citing

nondisclosure agreements. He said Scintil's goal is to be able

to produce hundreds of thousands of chips per month by then.

"The way we make it is fundamentally different," Crowley

said in an interview. "We can mass produce them ... and we can

satisfy a big chunk of the market."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Chizu

Nomiyama )