Fiber routes, optical networks, data centers: Engage PR works where the technology is complicated and the audience is exacting. Its second act began just as the world stopped meeting in person.
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 AI boom has a plumbing problem: copper cannot carry every conversation between millions of chips. Lumentum is turning light into the scarce infrastructure layer - one laser, transceiver and microscopic mirror at a time.
AI may live in software, but it moves through light. Coherent makes much of the physical kit - from laser chips and specialty materials to complete optical links - that lets data centers, factories and scientific instruments work at speed.
Accton spent decades building the switches behind other companies’ brands. Now AI has turned that quiet Taiwanese manufacturing playbook into an $8 billion open-infrastructure business - and pulled it from the rack into optics, cooling and compute.
Cspeed is a Palo Alto optical semiconductor startup building silicon photonics and high-density III-V laser array technology to replace copper interconnects inside large-scale AI clusters. Founded in 2022 and led by serial semiconductor entrepreneur Sanjai Kohli, the company targets the data-movement bottlenecks that limit 'scale-up' AI infrastructure, aiming to deliver fiber-optic connectivity dense and cheap enough for high-volume datacenter deployment.
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.