- Taara thinks fiber shortages and supply chain hurdles have created an opening for its wireless tech
- The company is pitching its tech as both a bridge and backup solution for data centers
- Taara is initially targeting tier 2 and tier 3 data centers, where demand is more aligned with its current capabilities
Data centers need fiber and lots of it. But the workforce shortages and supply chain issues stretching out fiber lead times have created an interesting opening for players who can provide high-bandwidth links fast. That’s exactly where wireless optical technology company Taara thinks it can play.
“One of the biggest challenges they’re facing is that they are sitting on a large amount of chips and compute which is not being put into production while they are waiting for the rest of the infrastructure to be built out,” Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Fierce.
The big problem is that that compute is a depreciating asset. So, “by the time the buildings are up and running…you’ve already lost a significant amount of opportunity cost and value from those chips,” he explained.
Krishnaswamy said Taara, which can provide stackable 20 Gbps wireless optical links up to 20 kilometers (about 12 miles), can help. Basically, he thinks Taara can be a bridge technology to get facilities up and running while they wait for fiber to catch up, and then it can serve as a backup tech to keep those data centers online in case of fiber cuts or other issues with the fixed line connectivity.
What does Taara do?
Interestingly, Taara can trace its roots to Google’s balloon-based broadband bet Project Loon. Loon operated throughout the 2010s before being wound down in 2021. But the wireless optical communications technology Loon used was repurpose for terrestrial use by another bet, Project Taara. Project Taara was established in 2017 and spun out of Google into an independent company – the Taara of today – in early 2025.
Despite having ties to one of the three biggest hyperscalers on earth, Krishnaswamy said that’s not necessarily Taara’s target market – at least not to start with.
“If you’re going to hyperscalers, they are requiring 800 gigabits, 1.6 terabits and stuff like that. But there are a lot more smaller tier two, tier three kind of data centers which are probably in the 100 gigabits per second kind of range,” he explained. The latter makes it more feasible to pair up several of its 20-gig wireless optical links to achieve those speeds.
In testing, Krishnaswamy said Taara has achieved a 160 Gbps link by pairing its boxes next to each other. He added Taara has a plan to eventually increase capacity to hundreds of gigabits to terabits per second, though that product isn’t yet available.
But just because its technology works, doesn’t mean it’s easy to break into a new market, especially one like the data center realm where uptime is everything.
“When you bring in a novel technology, there is a little bit of curiosity, but also hesitation to take a bet on this. But at the same time they are hurting,” Krishnaswamy said. “So more often than not, they start with awareness to interest and then we go into some initial pilots.”
Right now, Krishnaswamy said Taara is in the “awareness to consideration” phase with a number of players. “I hope we’ll be able to quickly advance through some of those [to pilots].”
In addition to spending the next 12-18 months targeting data centers, Krishnaswamy said Taara will be pushing ahead in the enterprise, metro and interconnect markets. It is also working on a new version of its technology that could be used for shorter-hop 10 km applications – think last mile use cases or even edge data centers.
Someday its solution might make sense for residential use, but for now, Krishnaswamy said 20-gigs to the home is largely considered “overkill.”