Light Speed: How Integrated Photonics Is Solving AI’s Interconnect Crisis

June 1, 2026 -

The bottleneck limiting the next generation of artificial intelligence isn't compute power—it's the wire connecting the chips. French startup Scintil Photonics thinks it has the answer.

By Gordon Feller, allaboutcircuits.com

For decades, the semiconductor industry operated on a comforting assumption: as chips grew faster, the rest of the system would keep pace. That assumption is now breaking down, and nowhere is the stress more visible than inside an AI data center.

The numbers are staggering. Cloud bandwidth demand effectively doubles every two years. AI model sizes are scaling faster than Moore's Law can accommodate. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, captured the magnitude of the challenge at Computex 2025 when he remarked that the NVLink spine—the high-speed interconnect fabric linking Nvidia's GPU clusters—moves more data per second than the entire internet. What was once a theoretical constraint has become an operational emergency.

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