Photonics Is Moving Into Compute With The First Pure Play Public Quantum Photonics Xanadu to Launch

The technology that once lived inside fibre optic cables is now becoming the backbone of AI infrastructure, quantum computing and next-generation data centres

Light has always been the fastest thing in the universe, and for decades, the telecommunications industry was the only sector that really cared. Pulses of laser light bouncing through glass fibre connected continents, and that was about it. Photonics stayed in the cabling tray while transistors got all the glory. That story is changing fast. A growing number of well-funded companies are pushing photonic technology directly into the heart of computing, replacing copper wires with optical interconnects, building quantum computers powered entirely by photons, and exploring whether light can perform the matrix multiplications that underpin modern AI. As data centres hit unsustainable power consumption and copper interconnects slam into hard physical limits, photonics looks like the most credible answer to both problems.