Silicon Photonics

Shanghai-based optical computing firm Lightelligence raised about US$306 million on April 28, 2026 in a Hong Kong IPO whose retail tranche was oversubscribed nearly 5,800 times, opening at HK$880 versus an HK$183.20 offer price for a roughly HK$81.5 billion market capitalization at the open.

Credo Technology pays $750M cash plus stock for Israeli silicon photonics firm DustPhotonics, targeting $500M in combined optical revenue by fiscal 2027.

TSMC's Compact Universal Photonic Engine enters volume production in 2026, with NVIDIA's Spectrum-X Photonics switches and AMD's new $280 million R&D hub positioning optical interconnects as the successor to copper wiring in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia takes a $2 billion stake in Marvell Technology, integrating one of the semiconductor industry's top custom ASIC designers into its NVLink Fusion interconnect platform.

OFC 2026 drew 18,000 attendees as ST entered high-volume silicon photonics production, Lumentum showed VCSEL co-packaged optics, Coherent demoed a 6.4T CPO engine, and startups began sampling 3.2T photonic chips.

A prototype chip encodes neural network weights directly into nanoscale photonic structures, classifying biomedical images with up to 99 percent accuracy on a picosecond timescale while generating virtually no resistive heat.

NVIDIA pours $2 billion each into photonics makers Lumentum and Coherent, signaling that optical interconnects are becoming as critical to AI scaling as GPUs.