PODCAST: Lightmatter’s Harris on electrical bottlenecks for scaling AI with optics
Lightmatter, an emerging photonics provider, is centering its efforts on building a photonic infrastructure for AI at scale—interconnects, lasers, and eventually compute itself. Its interconnect product line—Passage — overcomes the limitations of traditional electrical, where bandwidth is constrained by the shoreline—the physical perimeter of the chip.
Since its founding by MIT researchers in 2017, Lightmatter has raised $850 million and has gained a $4.4 billion valuation.
In this latest Broadband Pulse podcast, we caught up with Nick Harris, founder and CEO of Lightmatter, about how it is helping the AI hyperscaler community find new ways to scale.
Opening/Introduction | 0:03
Overview of Lightmatter | 0:23
Lightmatter’s CEO Nick Harris provides an overview of the company and its optical network platforms.
Lightmatter’s interconnect platform | 1:49
Harris describes how its Passage L20, a bi-directional near-package optics (NPO) engine, can help overcome the fiber shortage, as well as its partnerships with Qualcomm and Nvidia.
Addressing fiber shortages | 4:46
How Lightmatter’s platforms use half the fiber, enabling cost savings.
Co-packaged Optics (CPO) and near-packaged optics (NPO) opportunities | 5:56
Lightmatter is seeing the initial ramp-up for NPO for 2027 and the end of 2028 for CPO.
Lightmatter’s NVIDIA relationship | 7:08
NVIDIA will play a critical part in scaling and delivering on performance promise for AI workloads, inference, and training.
The XPO (eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) | 8:25
Lightmatter joined the XPO MSA as a founding member, which aims to define a next-generation optical transceiver form factor designed to meet the massive bandwidth, reliability, and density requirements of hyperscale AI data centers.
Bidirectional (BiDi) technology | 9:27
How Lightmatter’s BiDi technology will affect the data center scale-out segment.
Final thoughts/Closing | 10:47
Harris provides his final thoughts about where Lightmatter sees the optical market going through the rest of 2026 and beyond.
Meet our guest
Nick Harris is the CEO of Lightmatter. With over 30 patents and 70 publications in journals including Nature, Nature Photonics, and Nature Physics, Nicholas’ seminal work on quantum and classical information processing with integrated photonics has helped launch the international research field of programmable photonics. Nicholas has been recognized by the MIT Technology Review through the prestigious Innovators Under 35 award (2021). The award had over 500 nominees and a panel of judges including artificial intelligence luminary Andrew Ng; previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), and Jony Ive (Apple). He received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and later served as a Postdoctoral Fellow through the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship.
About the Podcast
In the Lightwave Broadband Pulse podcast, we address the key issues affecting the optical and broadband industry segments. Join us every week for insights from industry leaders on these topics. Visit our website at www.lightwave.com and click on our podcast site at www.broadbandpulse.podbean.com.
About the Author
Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.
