Lumai is taking its optical AI hardware into a new evaluation setting: the Scaling Inference Lab backed by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA. The lab plans to deploy Lumai Iris inference servers as its first optical-compute platform, giving researchers a way to test the architecture at rack scale in a commercial data-center environment. Run by CommonAI CIC, the lab is intended to bridge a difficult gap for emerging AI hardware: demonstrating a novel processor is one…