optical-transceivers
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Lumilens Bet $50 Million That AI's Next Bottleneck Is the Wire
The two-year-old photonics company has a product inside a hyperscaler's live data centers and a plan to replace short copper links with light. Its harder bet is not merely designing faster optics - it is manufacturing them like semiconductors.
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.
Lumentum
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.
Coherent Corp.
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.
Accelight Technologies, Inc.
Accelight Technologies (ATI) is an ISO-certified ODM founded in 2017 that designs and manufactures high-speed optical connectivity products - transceiver modules from 100G to 1.6T, active optical and electrical cables, passive optical modules, and optical amplifiers - for hyperscale data centers, AI computing infrastructure, and telecom carriers. With R&D centers in Wuhan Optics Valley and Silicon Valley and manufacturing in China and Thailand, ATI positions itself as a supply-chain-secure alternative for cloud and AI networking optics.
Michael Wei
Michael Wei is the CEO of Accelight Technologies, a Pleasanton, California ODM that designs and manufactures optical transceivers, EDFA amplifiers, and passive fiber components for telecom carriers and AI data centers. He is an electrical engineer with three decades in the trenches of optical networking hardware, with earlier stops at Mitel, ADVA Optical Networking, Adaptix, Navini Networks, Schlumberger, and Invocon.
Proficium, Inc.
Proficium is a Union City, California optical connectivity company that designs, manufactures, and tests the cables and transceivers that move data inside hyperscale and AI data centers. Founded in 2003 by Dan Miranda, it supplies OEM-compatible optical transceivers (400G, 800G, and 1.6Tb/s), DAC/ACC/AOC copper and optical cables, fiber assemblies, and InfiniBand interconnects validated against gear from Arista, Cisco, NVIDIA, and Juniper. An early mover in AI/ML cluster networking since 2019, the company was acquired by private equity firm Mill Point Capital in 2024 to scale with surging data center demand.
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.
SCINTIL Photonics
SCINTIL Photonics is a Grenoble-based, fabless silicon photonics company building the world's first single-chip, DWDM-native laser source for AI data centers. Spun out of CEA-Leti and founded by Sylvie Menezo, its proprietary SHIP (Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics) process integrates lasers, modulators and detectors onto one manufacturable chip - powering its LEAF Light light engine for co-packaged optics that promises roughly one-sixth the power consumption of conventional pluggable optics. The company raised a $58M Series B in September 2025 with participation from NVIDIA.
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.