Silicon Valley’s AI infrastructure boom has created a surprisingly physical problem: there’s only so much data you can push through copper wires before heat, distance, and power consumption become overwhelming. That’s why investors, chipmakers, and cloud giants are suddenly paying close attention to photonics, using light instead of electrical signals to move data between AI chips and servers. I recently visited Lightmatter‘s Silicon Valley headquarters, where the startup demonstrated its latest photonics hardware for AI data centers. After the event, I sat down with Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris to talk about why ... (full story)