Lighting the AI fabric: photonics as the backbone of scalable intelligence

AI is redefining the physical architecture of computing. As models scale and AI evolves toward distributed, agentic intelligence, the limiting factor is no longer compute alone, but the ability to move data efficiently across chips, racks, and data centers. This talk explores how photonics is emerging as the backbone of scalable AI infrastructure. By extending connectivity beyond electrical I/O boundaries, optical interconnect technologies enable new network fabric architectures that scale with the demands of future AI workloads. They are reshaping how accelerators are composed into systems, how compute and memory resources are disaggregated and shared, and how AI compute infrastructure can grow sustainably in performance and energy efficiency.