Photonics: A Foundational Scaling Layer for AI-Era Computing

By Maurice Steinman, Lightelligence
EE Times | June 2, 2026

Photonics is becoming a foundational scaling layer for AI-era computing. Once discussed mainly in telecommunications and long-haul networking, optical technology is now appearing across the semiconductor ecosystem: inside data centers, at the edge of packages, between chips, across racks, and as part of computing itself. The reason is simple. The hardest problems in computing are no longer confined to the transistor. They are system-level problems: How to move more data over longer distances with lower latency, less power, and stronger security.

That shift is changing how the industry thinks about Moore’s Law. For decades, progress was measured by what could be packed onto a single chip. AI is stretching that definition. The new unit of performance is often not a processor, but a cluster. Large language models and generative AI systems routinely exceed the resources of a single server, requiring groups of accelerators to behave like one computer. In that environment, scaling is limited as much by communication and memory access as by raw compute.

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