It's the need for speed. If Jensen Huang's dream of connecting, not just servers but connecting entire data centers, into one giant chip, you have to go with light.
From Reuters, March 11:
Scintil Photonics, a French startup backed by Nvidia, on Wednesday said it has started providing laser chips to customers for testing.
Scintil is one of a number of startups working out how to move information around inside artificial intelligence servers such as those made by Nvidia (NVDA.O), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), using pulses of light rather than electrical signals, a move that could ease the task of linking many chips together to form one large computer. Analysts expect Nvidia to reveal more about its plans for the technology, called co-packaged optics, at its developer conference in Silicon Valley next week.
All optical systems rely on a laser chip to generate the beams of light that will carry information, and those chips, made with a special material called indium phosphide and mostly used in long-distance communications networks, are not currently made in large enough volumes to meet the demand from AI data centers. That supply dynamic drove Nvidia earlier this month to invest $2 billion each in two of the largest makers of those lasers, Lumentum (LITE.O), and Coherent (COHR.N)....
....MUCH MORE
Recently, "Connecting it all together: "Nvidia to invest $4 billion in two photonics companies" (NVDA; LITE; COHR)" which also back-links to Nvidia's purchase of Mellonex.
Nvidia's networking business was running at $31 billion per annum as of the last earnings statement, also linked in the "Connecting..." post.
