News: Optoelectronics
18 March 2025
Lumentum chosen as NVIDIA silicon photonics ecosystem partner to advance AI networking at scale
Lumentum Holdings Inc of San Jose, CA, USA (which designs and makes optical and photonic products for optical networks and lasers for industrial and consumer markets) has been selected as a key contributor in NVIDIA’s silicon photonics ecosystem. Lumentum’s high-power, high-efficiency lasers have a crucial role in the development and deployment of new NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics networking switches.
Scaling AI factories presents significant power consumption challenges. NVIDIA’s newly announced Spectrum-X Photonics and Quantum-X Photonics networking switches integrate photonic innovations, including Lumentum’s high-power, high-efficiency lasers, to significantly reduce power consumption, enhance resilience, and enable faster deployment.
“Innovations that drastically lower networking power consumption will expand the market for photonic components, supporting larger AI installations and accelerating the transition from copper to photonic interconnects,” says Wupen Yuen, Lumentum’s president Cloud and Networking Technology and Product. “We look forward to collaborating with NVIDIA on further photonic innovations to drive AI infrastructure scalability.”
Lumentum provides high-performance indium phosphide (InP) laser solutions for data infrastructure. The laser technology complements its existing electro-absorption modulated lasers (EMLs), which power many existing 400Gb/s, 800Gb/s and upcoming 1.6Tb/s optical transceivers in cloud and AI data centers.
“Photonics switch technology will revolutionize data centers and advance a new wave of AI factories,” says Gilad Shainer, senior VP of networking at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA’s collaboration with innovators such as Lumentum will enable the next-generation of million-scale AI.”
