coherent-optics
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Infinera Bet the Network on a Chip of Light
The company made optical networks smaller by building the light-handling chip itself. Two decades later, Nokia bought the whole wager - and its route into the cloud.
Ciena’s AI opportunity runs through old fiber
The company that helped telephone carriers squeeze more from their cables is selling the same economic idea to the AI era. The speeds have changed. The appeal of avoiding another dig has not.
The Tiny Box Carrying AI's Biggest Traffic Jam
InnoLight makes the pack-of-gum-sized optical modules that let AI clusters talk at 800 gigabits and beyond. Its real product is not light alone, but a practical escape route from bandwidth, heat and power constraints.
TeraHop
TeraHop is an optical solutions provider building high-speed optical transceivers and modules for AI clusters and data centers. Operating from Singapore, San Jose, Thailand and a new Texas plant, it ships 400G, 800G, 1.6T and emerging 12.8T-class optics. As the international-facing arm of Zhongji InnoLight - the world's largest optical-transceiver maker - TeraHop pairs high-volume manufacturing with R&D partnerships across NVIDIA, Marvell and Corning, and in 2025-2026 raised roughly US$517M with backing from Abu Dhabi's ADIA and Singapore's Temasek.
HyperLight Corporation
HyperLight is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that designs and manufactures photonic integrated circuits on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), a material prized for ultrafast, low-voltage electro-optic modulation. A 2018 spin-out from Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, the company built what it describes as the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN manufacturing line - now expanding to 8-inch - and packages it as a modular TFLN Chiplet platform. Its modulator chips target the bandwidth and power-efficiency demands of AI data centers, telecom optical networks and high-performance computing, enabling 1.6 Tbps-class links at CMOS-level drive voltages.
Sheng Liu
Sheng Liu is the CEO of TeraHop and co-founder of InnoLight Technology (now Zhongji Innolight), a company that commands over half the global market share in 800G optical transceivers. A PhD from Georgia Tech, he returned to China in 2008 to fill a domestic gap in high-end optical modules, built InnoLight into a global leader across 400G, 800G, and 1.6T products, and now leads TeraHop - backed by Temasek and ADIA - to power the optical backbone of AI infrastructure worldwide.