👁️ Nvidia is spending billions to replace copper with light inside AI data...

👁️ Nvidia is spending billions to replace copper with light inside AI data centers. In just a few months, Nvidia reportedly committed over $6.5 billion toward photonics, technology that moves data using light instead of traditional electrical signals through copper cables. The spending spree includes: • $2B tied to Coherent and Lumentum • $3.2B toward Corning • $2B linked to Marvell Technology • Participation in a $500M round for Ayar Labs Modern AI clusters are becoming too massive for copper wiring alone. When thousands of GPUs communicate across racks, copper starts hitting physical limits: • higher heat • signal degradation • power inefficiency • slower long-distance bandwidth scaling Photonics solves this by sending information as light through optical links. Faster communication between GPUs means larger AI systems can act like one giant computer. This is becoming critical for next-generation AI training. The real power move is supply chain control. By locking in huge procurement commitments now, Nvidia is effectively securing a large share of the world’s advanced optical component capacity years in advance. That means competitors may not just be fighting for GPUs anymore, they may struggle to get the networking hardware needed to connect them. Source. @aipost 🏴